whats your biggest purchase disapointment?

[Bloke From Barnet]

My Alesis Midiverb 4. I bought it about 10 years ago and have used it for no more than 10 hours because the damn power supply won't last very long. I have bought 2 replacement PSUs from Alesis and both died very quickly and I haven't managed to find another PSU of the same spec elsewhere.
Its still in my rack, the machine itself is great, if only I could find some way to power it!

[Khazul]

Alesis Fusion 8HD - a board with so much promise, bought from DV just after they became aviable in the UK and the price had dropped from the original utter rip off launch price at 1799 down to 999UKP.

It was bought primarily as a standalone sequencer wokstation for sketch out stuff - ie very much for its seuqncing and audio recording capability and well as giving me a sampler and FM sysnth to play with (Editing DX7 patches on my Motif ES DX7 card is a real pain), and I needed a fully weight piano-like controller keyboard as well for my various rompler sound modules.

So onto problems - regular crashes, audio and midi was allways completely out of sync, it coulnt even loop a section in the sequencer relaibly, which pretty much made it useless for that, however some of the sounds were good once I had fixed the appalling EQ on some of the patches.

I still couldnt get away from the blatent sample switching and recording artifacts in some of the samples.

Anyway - alesis were full of promise over support, upgrades etc, were regular release sound banks etc - ie it all looked like it would get sorted out.

However the months roll by, I deparatetly needed the scratch sequencer - so gave up and bought an MPC2500 (so by now I have ended up payiong the cost of an 88 key high end workstation, could have bough a Fantom X8 for eg and not happy). More OS updates, still no fixes for the sequencer problems, but did get a few new features along with a hugely annoying change to key velocity response in one of the updates.

The last OS update they ever issue prior to abandoning it and their customer fixed most of the sequencer issues, but left so many other area unchanged. meanwhile Alesis have been droppng the prices on them so much that I cant even sell it anymore for much more than peanuts.

So now - I use it as a weighted controller (which is great for) and single mode synth - not workstation. I couldnt even buy a quality weighted controller for the price I could get for it.

It does have many positive aspects - the VA is pretty good within its limits (but I have loads of much better VAs anyway), the FM synth is pretty good, modulation options are excellent, effects are pretty decent - much prefer them to korg and yamaha, but behind all that there are so many disconnected and unfinished features in it that actually the whole isnt that good - shame - it had so much potential.

These days - I'll never touch another digital Alesis product and given their owners now own AKAIs (and Novation?) - Im actually pretty nervous about continuing support for AKAI and Novation products - and that probably counts out Focurite as well.

So now - Im looking to dump the 8HD for peanuts, sell my Motif ES rack, Fantom XR and triton rack and perhaps get a Kurzweil PC3X.

I know Access had huge problem with the Virus TI on day one and for some time after - I know - I've mine from a little before the launch date (dont ask ) so have been though hell with that - but excellent on going support from them has turned that into (IMHO) probably the best (for so many reasons) synth for me that money can buy today. So now - Access is probably the only company I will trust not to abandon users - ironic that their is a petition going around about the Powercore. AFAIK, Access do still work on that, but it probably isnt a priority, and technically I think TC have to ask them to do further work on it.

Korg actually aint bad in this repect.

Roland seem OK as well, and actually very good (if not the best) when it comes to ongoing driver support from even discontinued products, however their is still a major unfixed midi sync bug in their original V-Synth that will never be fixed.

I also reserve considerable contempt for Yamaha over the lack of Vista 64 drivers after all this time for the 01x and i88x - ie mLan, so thats another company I dont trust any more.

Behringer - without exception every computer product of thiers I have had or just used has had significant software issues - the only reason I still use my BCR2K and BCF2K is that they are near-enough class complient USB MIDI devices so can be used without drivers, and yet their firmware for thier digital processing boxes is allways pretty solid.

Control surfaces in general - personally I nearly allways find these a disappointment - quality of construction, lack of logical thought gone into the resulting workflow they give in a DAW - its maybe because I am used to phsyical hardware with lots of phsyical controls, so software + generic control surface is such a poor substitute to me. Novation remote series are not bad, but the Remote SL construction quality is way below the original Remote series and as for Automap 2 - I dont know - i dont really feel it adds much. Would much rather use a Mackie C4 for controlling soft synths in most DAWs. To be far - alot of this is down to DAW software - only Reason (V3 onwards) really stands out in trying to do this sensibly.

To date - two control surfaces stand out to me - Vestax VCI-100 when used with Traktor 3 and Mackie universal (and presumably more recent incarnations of this) when used with a good DAW that fully supports it. I havnt yet had the pleasure of using high end 'Smart Console' and similar type control surfaces, nor the new offerings from SSL - which are out of reach of most of us anyway, hoiwver they also look exellent - and should be for 100K

I have high hopes for the Vestax VCM-600 when that comes out for use with Live for live sets - it strikes me as another good attempt at design for real users doing real stuff rather than another imaginary generic use case.

I guess the common thread amongst these exceptional control surfaces are high quality contruction and great integration with their host software.