I sing praises to
my Alesis ION. I do the engineering work for an "industrial music" band, and so I'm the guy who has to explain all the technical nuances of equipment to the guys who use it... and having gone through all the features of the ION, I'm very impressed.... For the money... we just may be dealing with the best virtual analogue synth made.
Of course, it has its deficiences... which should be obvious considering your only dealing with a $700 - $800 unit.... but the sounds are certainly sweet and the menu system is a hell of alot better than most any other I've ever seen.
My reference is in comparison to other units I've worked with... Nord Lead, Virus C, Roland JP-8000.... have'nt gotten my hands on an Alesis Andromeda yet... looking forward to experiencing some ubridled analogue power there...
One thing I was very impressed with is the VOCODER. The 40-band (thats alot) vocoder in the ION has got to be the "cleanest" vocoder in the world... I don't think its clarity copmpares to anything else I've ever tried... and I do alot of vocoding in my type of music.... every other vocoder from the top name units completely sucked compared to the ION... I'm real happy about that, and would actually pay $800 just for the vocoder since it's so integral to my work... Well worth the price.
The "vintage" presets are nice, though too few. There are a few patches which emulate old synthesizers... not exactly unique... but I did enjoy the patches which emulated old 70's and 80's songs.... some of them are extremely difficult and I don't think I could ever create them myself..... such as the arpeggiation on The Who's "Baba O' Reilly".... not sure how useful that is for making new songs... but its a fun patch to play around with. The bass line to RUSH's "Tom Sawyer" is also very cool... difficult to emulate, so they've done it for you.
The older (and current) units continue to have a problem with "ghost menuing"... that is the menu changes by itself... after reading 1,000 reviews before buying this synth... I gather its by no means an isolated incident. I noticed it does this very rarely on my unit. It's not a major hassle at all since you just hit the home button... but it could be a problem if you were doing a live show and the menu changed on you all of a sudden. Supposedly Alesis fixed this problem with their newer O/S but if they did... then they didn't fix the problem because my unit is fairly new and I still get the problem, though not nearly as bad as other people describe.
As for the "ghost menuing" issue on the ION, I might theorize an answer to explain some of the "mystery"... The knobs are ultra high resolution endless-rotary encoders.. and so if you touch them ever so lightly.... hell... if you blow on them (REALLY!), the damned things might activate. I think people are brushing up against the knobs without even realizing it... thus invoking a different menu.
The ARPS are very numerous (31 arps with 16 selectable sequence lengths for each), however... in truth... I wasn't really overly impressed with any of them... or any arp on any synthesizer for that matter... but with 31 arps, you do have a good selection to work with.
There are 3 seperate oscillators, but the one minor dissapointment (with most synthesizers) is that somebody really needs to come up with some new stuff other than sine wave triangle (100 percent adjustable as any saw shape) and rectangle (adjustable pulse width) wave... I mean really... how about something that amplitude modulates each oscillator in a ramping fashion or something.... For example
the Roland JP-8000 and 8080 has something called a "super saw".... I don't know what the hell a "super saw" is... but clearly it's something more elaborate than a simple triangle or saw wave... and it seems to give Rolands a distinct sound which I personally have not been able to emulate on other synths when I try to create my own patches.
