Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dave Peck
β‘οΈ
Ha! I completely forgot about that one! I tried to use one in my live synth rig when I was playing in some L.A. bands in the '80s. It would lock up and fill the display with scrambled characters, but even worse, it would apparently spew garbage MIDI data and lock up my entire synth rig with stuck notes, random patch changes, the works. What an evil piece of gear that was.
Interesting you guys had such trouble with the DSP-128, not a great sounding box per se, but unlike most other cheap multi-FX boxes from back then they went for muffled and dark sounding rather than metallic and fizzy so it actually worked pretty well for me.
I later upgraded mine to "Plus" specs with a user installed chip, and I never had a single issue with mine, from gigging to studio use in a rack on top of an SRV-2000 which got as hot as the surface of the sun.
One thing I give Digitech credit for was they had a great Midi implementation on that box, you could map and control EVERY PARAMETER, up to 8 at a time but you could assign every parameter in the box to a different midi CC and it worked great, only delays times would zipper but the reverb times were pretty seamless for what it was.
I actually owned a Quadraverb and then a DSP-256 at the same time as the DSP-128, always liked the Digitechs better from a build quality and workflow perspective, the Quadraverb "verbs" sounded a bit better but of course none of these were in the PCM-70 class.
The ART stuff from that era is just horrid, metallic, clangy, sound like ****.
Probably my worst F/X purchase was an original Quadraverb 2, it was buggy would randomly crash, then the display started getting dark at random in one corner, and then I couldn't order the update chip from Alesis for some reason, had to be from a dealer and the guys at GC just couldn't seem to do this because "it's not in our computer".
It also had this huge gawdawful external PSU and programming it was like Chinese algebra.
Sold it on Ebay for about half what I paid for it.
Analogeezer