Worst gear
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 9:27 pm
When Reason first came out, everyone realized someone needed to release a small midi keyboard with knobs and sliders. Well, someone did (I ordered it all the was from Australia since there were no dealers in the US). Besides being made so cheaply and shoddily you couldn't believe it, and that it lost all settings when you turned it off, and it took 6 D-cell batteries to run without the power supply, they forgot to tell people that the knobs only had 5 bit resolution! Thus instead of sending out MIDI values 0, 1, 2, ...127 it would send out 0, 4, 8, 12, ... etc. As cheap as the Oxygen 8 was it still was infinitely better than that horrible thing.
The other horrible thing (and this was back in the 70s) was a small Allen and Heath mixer that was made with totally crappy components and build quality. The potentiometers and audio i/o jacks were all attached to the main circuit board with solder, and the metal housing just wrapped around it. So unless you treated the thing with kid gloves the connectors and controls would develop noise. Dust and dirt could easily get inside too due to its construction. And I paid something like USD600 for it since there was nothing like it at the time (I wanted to use it for multitracking with my Teac 4 channel tape recorder.) But each time I wanted to switch from recording to mix down, I had to remove all the cables and repatch them... ugh. When the first Tascam PortaStudio came out I was astounded...why did it take some company so long to figure out how to do that???
But even with the headaches you get with computers, I still would have a hard time going back..
r.
The other horrible thing (and this was back in the 70s) was a small Allen and Heath mixer that was made with totally crappy components and build quality. The potentiometers and audio i/o jacks were all attached to the main circuit board with solder, and the metal housing just wrapped around it. So unless you treated the thing with kid gloves the connectors and controls would develop noise. Dust and dirt could easily get inside too due to its construction. And I paid something like USD600 for it since there was nothing like it at the time (I wanted to use it for multitracking with my Teac 4 channel tape recorder.) But each time I wanted to switch from recording to mix down, I had to remove all the cables and repatch them... ugh. When the first Tascam PortaStudio came out I was astounded...why did it take some company so long to figure out how to do that???
But even with the headaches you get with computers, I still would have a hard time going back..
r.