Let's have a look at the Alesis Micro Enhancer. What is it? It's a
building, with sick people, but that's not important right now. Hahaha! It's a building...
No, that doesn't make sense. I messed up the joke. I'm sorry. I can't do this. The Micro Enhancer is a digital effects box
that adds a bit of high-frequency sizzle to an incoming signal, although the
effect is very subtle. It's one of Alesis' mid-80s Micro effects, along with
the Microverb, the Micro Gate, the Micro Limiter and a couple of others. They
came in a standard metal case with fins along the side, the idea being that
you could slot them together and screw them into a 19" cradle in order to fit
them into a standard 19" rack.
I realise now that they're handed, e.g. there are a limited number of ways to
slot them together. Of all the micro effects my impression is that the
Microverb was the most popular - it was the only one to have a sequel - and
secondly the Micro Limiter compressor, with the others a distant third.
Sound on Sound reviewed the series
back in 1988. Their reviewer was impressed with the Micro Limiter and Micro Gate
noise gate but baffled by the Micro Enhancer.
Over the years I've collected some of them. The
MicroVerb II
only has preset reverbs, and some of them have a boxy, metallic sound, but the
smaller presets fill out the sound nicely, and the cavern-sized LARGE 4 is
genuinely epic. The sound quality is surprisingly good, less hissy than I
expected. The
Micro Gate
is fun - it was originally intended to gate out microphone hiss
and cable buzzes, but it also has a trigger input that can gate the entire
signal, so you can feed chords or an entire mix into it and use a drum machine or trigger signal to make stuttering rhythms.
On to the Micro Enhancer. It's stereo-only. If you plug something into the left input
the sound only comes out of the left output. My hunch is that Alesis intended for it to go at the end of the effects chain, just before the speakers.
It has a limited range of controls, and although the manual talks up its
utility I found that it only had an effect with MIX and BANDWIDTH all the way up and THRESHOLD from 50% onwards.
Incidentally, what does an enhancer do? They're also called exciters.
They add some high-frequency fizz to a signal without increasing the amount of
global background noise, which would otherwise happen if you just turned up
the treble. The fine details are sketchy - the most popular exciter is made by
a company called Aphex, who are vague about its workings - but they all seem
to involve cutting off the bass frequencies, distorting the remaining high
frequency sounds, and mixing the result in with the original signal.
In the following video I try out the Micro Enhancer first. It doesn't do
anything for bass frequencies, only treble, and the results are subtle,
although distinguishable. It adds a bit of high-frequency sparkle without adding too much background hiss. I'm feeding a synthesiser into it, and in theory I could just open the filter up, but what if I was using an instrument that doesn't have a filter, such as a guitar, or a bango, or a kazoo, or a person?
As a bonus the second half features a
Joe Meek VC3, which also has an exciter. Does the exciter in the Joe Meek VC3 do the same thing as the enhancer in the Micro Enhancer? I have no idea. It's not subtle at all, but the results are much more
flexible, especially if you don't mind a bit of grit.
Ultimately the Micro Enhancer is hard to rate. It does what it sets out to do. It adds a bit of high-frequency sparkle without adding too much extra noise. Given the fact it has stereo inputs and outputs I suspect Alesis intended or at least expected that you would use it on a complete mix, in order to give the music a radio-friendly sheen, and I imagine it would be inoffensive when used as a mix sweetener. And perhaps if you were recording to a tape machine and doing a lot of overdubs, you might have used the Enhancer to stop the sound getting too muddy. But Logic, for example, already has a built-in exciter, and with digital recording in a modern studio it strikes me that the Micro Enhancer is a relic of the days of analogue tape.
The VC3, on the other hand, is still great fun because it sounds awful at higher settings, but awful in a good way.
