Does Alesis Gear have More Problems than Other Brands?

ibleedburgundy

ibleedburgundy

The Anti-Lambo
I have limited experience with Alesis (I had an ADAT and played a DM6 this weekend) but it hasn't been good. The ADAT functioned properly for about 2 weeks. I sent it back to them twice for repairs. Each time they sent it back to me without fixing it. I ultimately used it purely for the A/D conversion hooked up through light pipe to a Digi 002 - it was fine in this capacity.

I played a DM6 this weekend. For some reason the snare and one of the Toms was way lower volume than everything else. I looked online and there were tons of people complaining about similar problems. The headphone jack was also pushed in. I also didn't like the way the drums were all wired with 1 harness. So if one cable goes bad you have to replace them all. I had a roland set years ago and each cable was independent.

Same with the Quadraverb - tons of people trying (and often failing) fix problems with the display, error messages, etc. I have no idea why a user should need to get caught up in that sort of debacle if it was built properly.

...which brings me to the subject of this thread: Does Alesis cut corners in terms of quality and reliability testing? How on Earth could ADATs have been so notoriously unreliable and yet so commonly used? Obviously Alesis gear is budget friendly, but do they reach the level of diminishing returns?

I figure if anyone is going to counter my experiences, it will those of you (homers) in this forum. :thumbs up:
 
I have two 20 bit ADATs. No issues with either that I didn't create or wasn't able to fix. I've been running an HD24 for many years without a hitch. Nothing but good luck with their gear.
Now my BRC has never completely played nice with the HD24 but it's close enough.
 
They did make some entry level stuff that's a little cheesy. But overall it ranges from decent to pretty good. My HD24 works like new though it doesn't get powered up that often.
 
I have had an Alesis Quadrasynth for more than 20 years. No problems except one parameter button needs to pushed harder than normal. Granted, it is the single most used button on the unit.
 
I have a guadreverb and an sr16 drum machine both still fine.
Oh, and I have a set of the big 3 way monitor ll speakers. Aside from once blowing up the tweeters, those are great as well.
 
Power supply died after maybe 5 years on a used Studio 24 mixer - excellent mixer when it did work. The direct outs were great with my ADAT. mjhamil who I play with said it's too hard to take it apart (boards are sandwiched together) so trash it. Only cost me $200 bucks so I junked it and bought their USB16FX 2.0 for 300 bucks off eBay about 3 years ago. Not high end but clean, has tons of features and channels and records 16 tracks at once through USB (which I never use). I just use it to practice with and record through my Lexicon interface anyway.

mjhamil had an old IO32 or something which was noisy all get go but that was back in the beginning of home recording so par for the consumer course.
 
I bought both the QS8 and an HD24 when they first came out. Both are still fully functional and they came out a long time ago.
 
I've not heard anyone with negative Alesis reports and a friend just bought one of their master keyboards and is very pleased with it. I genuinely believe now there are very, very few products on the market that have major flaws in any way - reliability, performance and usability, because with social media - trends are made well known worldwide in no time - which encourages manufacturers to make their products good.
 
I think that when big brands make budget gear, it usually finds a pretty huge audience. There is probably a metric crap-ton of their various devices out in the wild. So if a tenth of a percent of people have issues (I'm just making that number up), then that translates to a lot of people. Judging failure rate by search results is problematic for this reason. It could just be a fraction of a percent of the total number of users that experience issues, but with such a huge user base, that puts a relatively large number of individuals in the "negative experience" column. Plus, it's much less common for people to randomly post on forums or elsewhere when they are satisfied with a product, so the reviews and support forum posts might tend to skew towards the negative.

Same thing for Focusrite and their Scarlett 2i2. If I go looking for reports of a specific problem, there are a lot out there. But I try to keep in mind that the number of those things that they sell each year is mind-boggling, so we're basically just hearing from a small, yet vocal, minority of 2i2 users that show up to rant about their negative experience. Same for Behringer stuff (although I do get the impression that they had some legitimately fundamentally flawed devices a decade ago).
 
From the shallow end : The only piece of Alesis gear I've ever owned was a Midiverb 1 from the late 80's. Never had a problem with that.. until someone stole it and my mixer from my car.
 
I did have problems with their ADATs, but so did everyone else, it came as no surprise. Now you can't even give them away. The only way I got rid of my last one was to throw it in on a trade even though the guy I was trading with didn't want it. I told him he had to take it along with everything else. I couldn't give it away or sell it on CL and I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. I bought one new when they first came out. That one served me well but had to go in for repairs. I had another I just gave up on. I still have one that was given to me at an estate sale where I bought other equipment. This was after I gave my last one away, I don't know if it works lol, never used it. I had some ADAT tapes I had recordings on kicking around so I took it and keep it hanging around.
 
Tadpui said:
I think that when big brands make budget gear, it usually finds a pretty huge audience. There is probably a metric crap-ton of their various devices out in the wild. So if a tenth of a percent of people have issues (I'm just making that number up), then that translates to a lot of people. Judging failure rate by search results is problematic for this reason. It could just be a fraction of a percent of the total number of users that experience issues, but with such a huge user base, that puts a relatively large number of individuals in the "negative experience" column. Plus, it's much less common for people to randomly post on forums or elsewhere when they are satisfied with a product, so the reviews and support forum posts might tend to skew towards the negative.

Same thing for Focusrite and their Scarlett 2i2. If I go looking for reports of a specific problem, there are a lot out there. But I try to keep in mind that the number of those things that they sell each year is mind-boggling, so we're basically just hearing from a small, yet vocal, minority of 2i2 users that show up to rant about their negative experience. Same for Behringer stuff (although I do get the impression that they had some legitimately fundamentally flawed devices a decade ago).
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I think you've got a great point. If a company sells a million units and 100 people whine about it not working for them, it sounds like there's a problem, until you think about 999,900 people who didn't seem to have a problem. Then you have to estimate how many have no clue what they are doing. I've read one star reviews of gear that basically said "When I got the box is was crushed by Fed Ex, so I sent it back". That's not a failing of the company that made the gear! I've also read one star reviews that said "Plugged it in and it worked great!". Obviously some people have trouble reading instructions.

Now if you had someone like Neve building consoles for $100,000 and of the 100 sold, 10 said "my gosh this thing is junk", it might indicate a problem.
 
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