Let's have a look at the Alesis Microverb II, a budget-priced effects box from 1988. It's a 16-bit stereo digital reverb unit that sold for around £200 when it was new, at a time when digital reverbs typically cost three times that. There was a whole line of Microverbs, beginning with the original Microverb of 1986, then continuing with the Microverb III of 1991 and the Microverb 4 of 1996, by which time everybody wanted Alesis' own Quadraverb instead, so the line came to an end.
The Microverb was aimed at bedroom studio producers, but the form factor was such that it could easily be taken on the road as well. As a consequence the units I have seen tend to be either chipped and battered or mint-with-box-plus-original-PSU. Physically it feels like a solid chunk of metal. Nothing rattles although the pots crackle a bit. I need to get hold of some switch cleaning spray.
Alesis was founded in 1984. The company initially majored in digital effects boxes, but it branched out with the sample-based HR-16 and SR-16 drum machines and the popular ADAT multi-channel digital audio tape system of the 1990s. For a while ADAT was a big thing and as far I know it's the only digital tape system ever mentioned in song by The Prodigy, in the opening lines of "Diesel Power".
Sadly Alesis was not immune to the Great Hardware Apocalypse that hit the world of music production at the turn of the millennium. There was a point in the very late 1990s when Pro Tools and Cubase VST etc hit critical mass, and seemingly overnight the world's recording studios dumped their digital audio hardware in favour of software. Back in 2000, 2001 I remember seeing stacks of Akai samplers and Alesis ADAT machines for sale in Notting Hill's Musical Instrument Exchange, which itself went out of business itself a few years later.
The likes of Lexicon and Dolby managed to survive at the very top end of the market, but Alesis had always targeted the amateur musician. Unfortunately even low-budget bedroom producers were caught up in the Great Hardware Apocalypse. They threw out their Tascam Portastudios and Microverbs in favour of free VST plugins and legitimately-purchased copies of Fruityloops and latterly Albeton Live, leaving Alesis without a market.
As a result Alesis filed for bankruptcy in 2001. It recovered and continued as a going concern for at least fifteen years afterwards, but I can't tell if it's still active or not, or whether it develops new products or simply resells stuff made in China. It has a website but it's very spartan.
Let's talk about the Microverb. The first two versions were housed in a small case that was one-third the width of a standard 19" rack, hence the name. There was a family of Alesis Micro effects, including the Micro Limiter, Micro Expander, and Micro Gate. They all had fins on the sides so that three units could be slotted together to form a 19" rackmount unit:
In an example of feature creep the Microverb III and 4 came in standard rackmount cases, so they weren't really micro any more. The real successor of the Microverb was the Nanoverb (1996), which looked very similar to the first two Microverbs and had a similar feature set.
Alesis also sold the half-rack-sized MIDIVerb, which paralleled the Microverb range but had MIDI control. It went through four iterations which were released about a year before the corresponding Microverb.
The company's other products included the Quadraverb (1989) and Quadraverb 2 (1993), which had EQ, delay, chorus/flange and reverb, and were generally much more capable machines; the Quadraverb GT included distortion and speaker simulations and was also sold in a compact case as the Wedge. Price-wise the range was roughly £250-350-450 MIDI/Micro/Quad in that order. There were also one-offs such as the MIDIFex preset digital delay unit and the Ineko and Picoverb preset reverb units of 2002/2003 and probably lots of others. For a small fee Quadraverb owners could upgrade their machines into the Quadraverb Plus, which could sample one and a half seconds of audio; curiously the company never released a rackmount sampler, although their Nanopiano and Quadrasynth instruments made extensive use of sampled sounds.
What do they mean today? Apparently a bunch of Warp Records artists from the Artificial Intelligence era used the Quadraverbs, because they were the most flexible cheap reverbs available at the time; the guitarist from Phish regularly has or had a Microverb in his live guitar rig for its backwards reverb effect, and perhaps because of its compact size lots of people on the internet seem to have Microverbs tucked away in a cupboard somewhere. Alas, in common with most other professional digital audio gear from the 1990s Alesis products fall into an awkward place whereby they're not quirky enough to have a retro following but they're less practical than a VST, so what's the point? Some people hanker for the scuzzy sound of 12-bit samplers, but Alesis' gear was mostly 16-bit, 44/48khz, so it doesn't have much inherent sonic character.
But what of the Microverb II? To test it out I recorded a track with it, using a Behringer Model D and a Korg Volca Modular. Each of the five tracks was put through the Microverb at a modest mix setting. The instruments were fed into the Microverb and thence into the audio interface, e.g. I didn't use it as a send effect:
On the bad side the two gate effects aren't very good - the second one sounds too metallic - and most of the sixteen presets feel like variations of each other. Furthermore the unit would have benefited greatly from an EQ knob, or at least a top-end filter, because the reverbs are all very bright. Perhaps it was the fashion back then. With the mix knob turned up above 40% or the reverb takes on an unpleasant ringing tone. It has a "boxy" sound, for want of a better word. I had to do a lot of fiddling with the signal volume, input, and output controls to keep the noise down; if you're a fan of endless sustain compression it's not as noisy as I expected, but it's still noisy.
But on the positive side the reverb is surprisingly transparent at lower mix settings. Essentially the best presets are SMALL 2, which at around 10% thickens out the sound nicely and at higher levels adds a curious but not unpleasant ringing distortion effect; any of the MEDIUM presets, which again at moderate levels thicken out the sound; and LARGE 4, which has a much longer decay than the other presets.
Off the top of my head I used LARGE 4 at around 30% on all of the tracks above. At a higher level the sound becomes an unpleasant swirling mass, but with moderation LARGE 4 generates a nice ambient swoosh.
Now, I don't want to oversell the Microverb II. I bought it mostly as a novelty. I wanted to hear what a 1980s reverb sounded like, and I also fancied the idea of plugging a reverb into another reverb.
I also have a Stymon Bigsky (pictured), which is far more flexible. It has dozens of presets, some of which are very good, and they're all editable. The sound is a lot smoother, and even with the mix level turned up the reverb never seems overpowering; the original sound seems to float over a sea of warm reverb, whereas at higher levels the Microverb feels like sticking your head inside a metal box. In fact let's compare the two:
In that video the Model D section has been fed through a compressor. You can hear the noise at the end of the sustain tail. The Big Sky is fed through the same compressor - I essentially just swapped the two boxes - but is obviously much less noisy, and the reverb is more pleasant.
Still, the Microverb II is better than I expected; at the very least LARGE 4 at a low mix level is a neat ambient thickener. Of course in terms of flexibility the excellent and free Valhalla Supermassive plugin beats it hollow. I sequence with Logic, and I've never been enamoured of Logic's built-in reverbs - there are half a dozen, but none of them stand out - but you can chain them together with multiple effects and EQ plugins with just a few mouse clicks, whereas the Microverb requires cables and a power socket. At this point I'm curious to find out what the Quadraverb sounds like.
