ART DR-X

The sounds I was able to get have been OK. I think they will improve now I have fixed the battery and done a reset (see below). Still the original firmware from 1991. No upgrade, but I did dust it off a little.

Still undetermined about the sound. I'll try to test it out this week and update this post. I'll run it through a PA and try to connect it to my midi stuff as well.

I have a home studio/junkpile where I play my instruments. This has been fun until it went out. It kacked on me and displayed japanese symbols before going dark. I found an ART web site and they talked about replacing the battery inside the unit.

Unscrew the four screws - two on each side. Lift off the top. There's a motherboard and a second board on top. The battery is in between. Unplug the two cables on the corner. Use needle-nose pliers to gently squeeze the white plastic post so you can lift the secondary board and then I used a knife blade to carefully pop the battery out. The number on the top is the one you want. It's a BR2325, although it may be a CR2325 now. I got one at Radio Shack for about $4.50. Anyway, pop the new battery in, push the board down onto the posts, reconnect the cables - careful not to bend out the pins, and put the top back on. If there is a piece of cellophane on the inside of the top, it goes over the power transformer where the cord is.

Tighten up the screws and you're ready to go. Do the reset and you should be OK.

I am trying to find a user manual. Anyone know where I can find even a copy?

Good luck,

Shoe

I think ART vanished for a while, but I did see a decent new web site. Nothing for this unit. I think they deny it ever happened.

I am looking forward to mashing this into my rig - there is already a yamaha RX17, a GR-1, some keyboards and a bunch of guitars, drums and mikes. I also am in a band called the Nervewrackers.

It's certainly easy to figure it out, but it's also easy to get lost in complex effects...lots of options, lots of button-pressing.

I've only used it in a home studio environment with a cassette 4-track, so its sound quality was more than adequate. I loved the taps and the pitch shifts, though the unit never sounded very "warm." When it crashed -- which it did regularly -- it would produce fantastic overdriven distortion followed by a gorgeous squeal.

It almost makes me happy to come here and see that others have suffered as I have. Frequently one channel would fuzz out, and just when you'd compensated for the unbalanced levels it would fuzz back in again, blowing your eardrums. It would crash often enough for it to stop being a surprise. Over time I've needed to turn it on and off an increasing number of times to get it started...now, about 90% of the time, it wakes up with gibberish and no audio. And when it does finally wake up all the effects titles are garbage symbols...you need to do the factory reset to get them back. Anybody who depends on this unit for gigging -- even when it's being "nice" -- is asking for trouble.

I never tried...it was out of warranty when I bought it.

It was great for adding subtle effects to the mix -- reverb, delay -- and I loved the pitch shift. Modulation effects were less useful as you couldn't manually edit them without producing a clicking noise. Since I record experimental/noise music it wasn't catastrophic when it malfunctioned (sometimes it sounded good!) but now that it no longer powers up it's just gathering dust. It's time for me to buy a new effects processor.

The english manual is better that the awfull french translation...
The unit is pretty easy to use (I use it with a midi foot controller BOSS FC-50), but editing takes far too much time.

I use it with a Les Paul in a Hughes & Kettner Attax 100W, mainly for the modulations and reverberation effects, that sounds cool.

I would not depend on it ! Really not reliable, distortion and gain loss always at the wrong time (before I fixed it)

I bought it second hand, unfortunately no support.

I bought it second hand on 1994 (in France), and had a lot of troubles with the gain. With a lot of care, I use it in my home studio, but wouldn't play live with !

Very easy to use. Even without the manual.

Sound is ok after fixing the problem. The unit is placed in the efx rack in my home studio.

To solve the problem with this unit: connect it with a proper unballanced (e.g. from unballanced aux)to ballanced TRS with the ring disconnected at the input of the unit. The sound is thicker and no fallout anymore. I don't have the manual, i think this unit has ballenced connections. And the problems comes with the unballanced connections.

Never used there support

Average for a multi-effects box of its vintage

Infuriating intermittent right channel wet signal drop-out - several repairs by the crack staff at ART resulted in no improvement, so I now use it as a mono box.

I've never encountered a less reliable piece of audio equipment in my life, and I'm not excluding an amp that was wired together with alligator clips.

Repairs had no effect, though they claimed that the unit worked just fine on the bench.

To my fellow DR-X owners - gents, it looks like we've got a classic on our hands - one of those freakish turds that makes it on to the market just long enough to become famous for its awfulness. One warning to used DR-X shoppers - remember, if it functions and sounds okay, it's probably not a real DR-X. Don't be fooled by imitations.... caveat emptor.

Another $50 doorstop, it would appear. I just picked up a "replacement" but I bought my first one of these in about 92 and I never found it that hard to navigate through. The manual was pretty decent from what I remember. Haven't looked at it since the mid 90's

I got my first one of these when I was young and for a long time it was by far the best piece of my collection. Used it on many things and while it's no lexicon I could get decent sound out of it. It was always a bit noisy but i've heard worse..

Depended on it for about 10 years (til 2002) then suddenly everything on the display was jibberish. the presets still work you just can't read which one you're on. A nostalgic feeling came over me one day when looking at it so I recently picked up one on ebay that was meant as a replacemnt to bring some of my favorite patches back to life. Despite the sellers claim that it was in perfect working condition it's in worse shape than the one I was trying to replace.

A web search for help led me here. I saw an email amongst these posts for ART but I don't expect my queries to go far unfortunately. If anyone has had and solved a simular problem please let me know about it.

Liked it when it worked, doesn't sound like I'm going to have much luck finding one that still does.

If I wanted to push a button numerous times to get somewhere I'm better off calling up a phone sex line for the deaf

It sounded OK for as long as it worked.

I am reminded of a line from the movie "My Blue Heaven":..." those shoes, like my wife, it's a wonder she lasted as long as she did"

I even changed the lithium battery myself, at $7.00 a pop. Didn't help

I got lucky on this one as I only dropped $50 on my doorstop.I actually came here to try and find a manual.
Dang, can't even put a 0 in the rating

sounded decent for dressing up drums and vocals, as for taming full mixes I could never get the stereo channels to cooperate.
Anything I wish it had? Try a manual for one, an acknowledgement on the ART website for another

Im no wizard but, I did read the manual many times. Not to user friendly overall.

Snap, crackle, pop. What are those little men on the cereal box doing inside my effects processor?

It's sitting broken. Question says "would you use it on a gig without a backup?" Hell, I can't get it to work in the first place how could I ever use it on a gig? I'd be using my backup already.

Send in $100 dollars and they'll fix it. Not from what I've been reading here. Hell, I'm saving every penny I have for something else. Wouldn't even think about ressurecting this monster from the grave.

Wont waste any more time. Have a great day.

This unit was pretty easy to use. I was up and making noise in no time. This unit was built before it was common to use knobs on multi effects units. Pretty basic stuff. It's like the Comodore 64 of effects racks

I bought this unit 15 years ago and it was my first effects processor. I used this with a Fender American Standard Tele, an American Deluxe Strat Plus and two red knob Fender, "The Twin" 2x12 combos. I had been playing guitar for about 2 years at the time, and as you can see by my amp choices and effects, I didn't know much about good effects (did they make good ones in the 80's?) or amps (those red knob Fenders, while better than my first amp, were pretty lame). However, because of my inexperience at the time, I thought they were pretty awesome. I sold my DR-X (and my red knobbed nightmares) quite a few years ago ('93 i think). My friend who I was in a band with all those years ago also bought one at the same time I did and still has his. Despite my constant ribbing, he still uses it for his home recordings.

"But what about the sound quality", you ask?...It sucks. When we bought our DR-X's they were ok, but you have to remember, it was the late 80's and the multi effects racks at the time all sounded pretty fake and cheesey. When I listen to the DRX now, I think we must have been pretty high to think that these units sounded any good. See what too much LSD will do?! Anyway, besides sounding horribly dated, the DR-X is fairly noisy. If you're in a 80's new wave cover band, you might be able to get some use out of this dinosaur. That is if it works.

Here's where the DR-X earns true legendary status. These were one of the most poorly built units on the planet. Not only did mine start making weird hissing noises and eventually no sound at all, my friends' DR-X started doing the exact same thing. From what I understand, pretty much every DR-X went to market with some type of faulty audio harness or something like that, which caused a vast majority of these units to fail. This brings me to the next category...

Ok, ART unleashes a shitload of these defective boxes on an unsuspecting public and despite the fact that they were completely aware that the units were defective, if your unit was even one second over the warantee period (1 year) they had the clams to charge $200 to fix the damn thing and leave me without any effects for over a month. Damn that was pretty lame. Fortunately, being without the DR-X for so long got me to realize how much better I could make my guitar sound without it. When I got it back and plugged it in, the good tones I was getting without it sounded like crap. It was at that time I made the decision to sell it. Best decision I ever made!

These days I use mostly really nice vintage and vintage reissue amps and high quality boutique pedals. The only way I would ever own another DR-X is if I fell into a Syd Barrett type psychosis and began collecting jars of my own urine in my closet in preparation for the second coming of the lord. With all the low cost options out there on the market out there today, there's no logical reason to own a DR-X. Truly the Yugo of effects racks.

Programming is straight forward, although you would never come close to using all the features available without the manual. Even with it, a few calls were needed to A.R.T to clarify some operations. A bright red LED display clearly shows the patch you are using, much better than LCDs when making fast changes in a gig. Signal output is displayed by different colored LEDs, a great design to instantly see what output level you are at from across the room. The volume sliders are too small, and larger pots would have made dialing in a specific volume easier.

This unit provides a dozen effects in one box, with a host of paramater changes for each. You can tell by the patches that it was designed primarially for guitarists looking to tweak their sound. Thus 'distortion' is a good thing for a guitar, but not to useful for a synth mix. There is multiple reverb, delay, and chorus goodies which can really enhance a mono source, as was the case with some samplers of this vintage. It really shines on vocal enhancement, and is also great for compression setups to get FM quality normalization EQs. Its weakness is background white noise in some effects, which can be frustrating when trying to tweak the output.

I haven't seen the problems other have had with the unit. Maybe I was the one who got the 'working' model. Mine has been rack mounted for 10 years, moved around Los Angeles and across the country, and still works perfectly.

Again, no hardware software issues. A couple of operation questions that was easily resolved by a phonecall to A.R.T. The tech I talked to knew his stuff. I'll rate it a 5 since I never really had a repair problem.

The DR-X was what I wanted, a multi-effects unit without having to buy a stack of separate units to do the same thing. It has been used to enhance electronic drums, add stereo to a mono sampler output, enhance vocals, normalize tape recordings, and used as the primary effects on a send/return output of a 24ch mixer. It appears reliable when mounted in a portable rackmount case for gigs, but I've always been very careful with my equipment. If it was lost, I would look at the latest A.R.T effects units for a replacement.

well, it's got a lot under the hood, so it's a bit complex. I learned to use it ok

I liked it for processing voice sometimes. The chain of effects possible could really make a weak vocal punch through.

I got more use out of it than most. Of course, the reason I'm researching it now on the net is because it went bad. I also returned it 2x after purchase. It has a grounding problem, and has always been unstable. When you need it most ? It's dead...

This product is jinxed, and they know it

If you can't count on it, you end up not using it.

It's hard to say since they never gave me a proper manual for it - they promised to mail one when it was finished, but never did. I'm not sure exactly what it can do. Now I don't know because it doesn't work any more.

From what I recall, the sound quality was okay, but not great.

It hasn't worked for me in many years. When it did work, it was intermittant. This is not a gigging unit! In fact, it is not a reliable studio unit, in fact do *not* ever buy anything from ART. You have been warned.

I once called them about getting a manual, but I think they were going to charge me. So I said to forget it because I don't want to waste anymore money on it. The web site does not even mention this unit. They seem to want to forget they made this piece of garbage. Well, I will be forgetting ART.

Stay far away from this unit and ART.

The DR-X is not too hard to use, if you have the manual, but otherwise it can get a little cryptic. The display is so tiny that it's hard to tell what effects are on at any given time.

When the unit works, it sounds OK. The effects are a little brittle at times, but EQ can help. It's got a huge selection of effects, so it would have made a killer addition to my home studio. This unit would probably have gotten higher marks for me in the sound quality area, if only I could have kept the thing going long enough to fine-tune it a bit more. See below.

I only give this unit a "1", because the form won't let me give it a NEGATIVE number. The ART DR-X has to be, without a doubt, the single most unreliable, messed-up, crashy, buggy, horrible device I have ever encountered in my musical career. It freaks out if you bump it, plug it in, hell, even just look at it! I've had it for about three years, and it has worked for maybe two weeks out of that time. What's more, I've sent it in for repairs a couple of times. It always comes back just as screwed up as before.

When I called ART customer support (over and over again), they were very polite, and had a couple of suggestions, but they didn't offer to exchange the unit or give me a free repair. They just sort of expressed sympathy that I was OUTTA LUCK. No offer of a piece of replacement gear at a discount, no nothing. This after I'd paid to have it fixed AT LEAST TWICE, and it has NEVER, EVER WORKED. I am ashamed to admit that I have shelled out more for these non-repairs than I paid for the unit in the first place. I don't know if the local music store is ripping me off and not even sending it in, or if ART's technicians just couldn't find the problem. I really hate to be so negative, but it's really as bad as I say, no exaggeration.

I could not recommend ART to anyone, for any purpose. If you should ever encounter a piece of ART gear, do not allow it to come within several meters of any existing, quality gear, or it will likely cause major electronic malfunctions by osmosis. I am convinced that my DR-X is somehow responsible for my inability to have a stable and satisfying relationship with members of the opposite sex. I would hurl the ghastly waste of printed circuit board and steel from my balcony in a fit of rage, but I'm afraid that some small child might pick it up and send it in to ART for repairs, thus passing the curse on to another hapless victim. Oh, and never approach ART gear in the evening, when its powers are strongest.

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