Alesis Wedge Master Reverb

I am an editing freak. I hate presets and almost never use them.
The Wedge is a "Dream" for on the fly editing and tweaking. I am a synth player and studio engineer and I can tweak and mold reverbs at lightning speed with this unit. No hidden or hard to get menues. Push the edit button to get to one of 5 pages and grab a slider. Hit store and you are done !

Alesis has always had a signature reverb sound ,"Warm and cloudy".
This is not the reverb for you if you want pure natural clarity.
Actually the Wedge is Alesis' best sounding Reverb so far. I have had a Midiverb, Quadraverb and a Q2. This reverb adds a better response and brightness to it's top end than the previous units.
I run it on an effects bus on my mixing board and have used it for Acoustic guitar (Great) ,Vocals (Depends on the singer, but usually adds a good fat sound to vocals), Synths (Awsome - especially for ambient padded sound worlds) & drums (So So - usually not fast or crisp enough for drums and percusion)

I give it an eight as it has a sound I love personally.
Like any effect it should add colors that you like. Me I love it
I took off 2 points as it does have a bit of a noise problem it is kind of hissy on very wet mixes, but I tend to mix very wet . I find Lexicon gear to be too noisy at times.

Used it on tons of sessions , have taken it to gigs. Never had a problem yet. Hell, I have forgotten to shut it off for 3 days at a time and never had a problem.

never needed it.

I gave it a ten because even though there are better sounding verbs from Lexy or TC for the price and editing features it is a great value.
I do ambient, space,synth music and I know 5 pros in the field with multiple Cds out and they all have one. It adds great color and warmth to any mix.
I actually bought one at the original price point after checking it out at the NAMM show. I thought it was a great price at $500 especially compred to $1000 offerings from every one else. No other under $800 unit can touch its flexability or sound capabilities.
For $100 it was an absolute steal. I have friends who bought 2 or three at one time. In one night me and 3 friends clear out the Chicago Guitar Center's stock.
PS I got to return mine that I bought at full price as it was from a mail order company with a liberal return policy so I was a very happy boy.

It's pretty, didn't take me long to find my way around. The 4 sliders really speed up the editing process too (each time you change a page the sliders control something different so you get to use them for almost every perameter. If that's not enough, there's online help, just hold down one of the A,B,C,D buttons and it shows a description of the perameter that slider adjusts. I took away
one point because I don't agree with some of the names of the
perameters.

I used it mostly for live PA (mostly delay and reverb on vocals). I tried using it in my guitar rig but hated the reverbs.
The main weakness of the Wedge is it's reverbs. How ironic, since it's called a "master reverb".
The reverbs are so artificial sounding that I couldn't believe my ears at first and thought I had a bad connection somewhere. After using it at many gigs and hearing my friend's Wedge I knew it was just cheezy reverb algorhythms. Many of the older reverbs beat it hands down! A perfect example is the Rocktron Intellifex, almost 10 years older than the Wedge.
Sound quality is ok otherwise, but maybe a little 'digitally' noisy, generally only audible when the music gets real quiet. It's best used on an effects loop or whatever but don't run your whole signal through it.

I never had a problem but I expect one. It's built cheap, runs hot,
has a proprietary power supply with a connector that doesn't lock in nice and tight. I'm giving this the benefit of the doubt, hence the 8

Never used it, hope I don't need to.

Pretty cool for delays especially because of the tap tempo and long delay times. Don't buy it for reverbs!
The sliders are great for editing but they don't do anything unless you're in edit mode. It was overpriced before it was discontinued, it should never have been more than $200. I'm keeping it because I'm used to using it for delays, but if it died or was stolen I wouln't buy another one. Not even at the $100 closout price I paid.
I just gotta say it again: The reverbs suck.

Fairly easy, if you use the effects as they came from the factory, but it can start to get complicated if you decide to edit your own settings. I like it for both reasons - easy if your lazy, but you always have the option to change stuff if you need to.

It does have a funky power supply though, which makes it kind of inconvenient, so I docked a point for this.

Very good fidelity overall. Not all the effects thrill me, but there are just so many that you have no choice but to find something you like. I'm especially happy with the number of reverb choices it has (the main reason I got it). Some are digital sounding, others are nice and warm. Plus there are various chorus, flange, and delay effects, a couple tremolos and an auto-wah, which I dig.

One thing I did notice was a drop in signal strength when going through this unit, even thru the effects loop on my guitar amp. Nothing alarming, just be aware of it. One point off for that.

Still works. It's plastic, so you can't be too hard on it and expect it to do well. Best for studio use.

OK, so I'm a part of the "Guitar Center Club" when they had their $99 special - otherwise I would have never bought it at the original price ($500!). Alesis probably stopped making it due to poor sales, but if they just reduced the price it would have sold like hot cakes. I wish I would have gotten two of them! Anyway, I have one now and the only way I'll ever let it go is when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers! If you find one of these for a good price, you'd better get it, because you'll probably never find one again!

Follow the manual and you have no problem getting it to work. The sliders and display make it pretty easy to understand editing existing patches. I'm controlling it with a MIDI foot controller (real-time expression pedals, too), that aspect of it was my first MIDI experience and it took a while with both User's Manuals to make it work right.
Editing the patches to get your own great sounds is pretty easy, the real time control really lets you tailor the sound perfectly.

I'm running this on stage as a MultiEff for my electric and acoustic guitars to an amp that's split direct and mic'd. I've got a LS-2 on order so I can play with it in an effects loop, but right now it's in-line.
Running in-line adds enough noise to make the sound man mention it, but as this is my only effect besides distortion, the total noise is probably lower than if you had separate boxes for each effect (delay, reverb, pitch shift, chorus/flange).
I noticed that using the Wedge's Bypass button makes your volume jump up - I don't know if this will fix itself when I loop it. It appears that using the intense effects tends to decrease your overall level, the more effect you mix in.
The actual effects are very nice (Alesis-quality others have told me). I use most of the ability of the box: long delay, tons of different reverbs, adjustable flanges and choruses, stereo panning, etc. Having the real-time expression pedals are great for cutting and boosting reverb or adjusting the delay feedback. You can't use them while you play the chorus effects, the manual warns you about this.
The one issue that I have with this unit is the pitch shift. All of the increments are dead-on accurate except the octaves (up and down). When using the octaves, the pitch is off by about -15cent, but the fine increment adjustment stops working correctly, making it impossible to recover the correct octaved pitch. My software version is V1.02. I have contacted Alesis on this and they said there was no way they were going to fix that, since it's a discontinued product. (So much for warranty support! See below.)

Fairly reliable. It's made for studios, but it's OK to use on gigs. I have not had a memory loss situation yet, after about a year of use. The main problem I've had for reliability was the power supply jack. This unit re-uses an existing Alesis power supply, it has a DIN connector that requires a LOT of insertion force to seat properly. After using it for a few weeks I wanted to modify it for a second (normal) power supply. I opened the case and discovered that the receptacle mounting flanges had busted solder connections resulting from trying to seat the plug. I fixed those and added my own barrel plug receptacle and have had no problems. Be warned, repeated insertions of the power plug (and probably the MIDI plugs) will cause damage to those internal parts (others have mentioned elsewhere that their unit had damaged plugs right out of the box).
Because of this I leave it set-up when I can, and have made a small extension adapter that I can leave plugged into the Wedge, allowing me to apply power through the original adapter with out straining the mounts.

Do not email Alesis. I have never received a response from them, after sending messages to a couple of different addresses numerous times.
I called regarding the Pitch Shift problem. The person I talked to had never heard about this problem, and didn't have the equipment to duplicate it. He is the one that told me that they were not likely to fix this problem. I tried calling another time, hoping to get an engineer that might have pity on me and send me out a EEPROM that fixes this problem. This time, the tech I talked to said they had a bulletin at Alesis mentioning that the octave pitch shift is off freq, to fix it you have to use the fine increment parameter. I explained that this didn't fix the problem, but the tech once again couldn't find anyone that knew anything about the details.
I have since given up on getting support for this problem. I don't know if Alesis has better support for the stuff they make money on, but it would have be nice if my first contact with the company went a little better.

I don't know of anyone that bought this without getting Guitar Center's $99 deal. For that price I can live without the Pitch Shift. I paid more for the foot controller gear than for the Wedge! Overall it performs very well as my "everything but distortion" effects. I would definitely replace it at the same price. Don't know how it a/b compares to other products, but I can do everything I need with this unit. This would be a 10 if Customer Support and Reliability hadn't brought it down.

Pretty easy to use. Lots of parameters for reverbs. Sometimes there are so many parameters that it will get tricky to find the one you want, though. Up to 5+ second delay, too! You can change values with the wheel, or the very cool sliders, which engage when you move one. Great for production sound effects -- foley, etc. You can get very specific with the type of room ambiance. The LCD screen is easy to read. I run my guitar or Chapman Stick through it, which is cool because the Stick has a stereo output, the Wedge, stereo input, and you can split the channels and have different effects on each. Lots of power in this little box. MIDI control, too, with several parameters. There is a slight delay when changing patches, which is apparent if you are holding a note, you hear a small glitch. Lots of presets, and room to save your own. It's a little weird in the way you build an effect from scratch, but not too bad once you get the hang of it.

There is some hiss in the output. It is greatly enhanced by distortion from an amp, so I highly recommend using this unit in your effects loop, and it sounds great that way! This thing was built to be a desktop production unit, so the fact that I can get it to work for guitar is great. Effects are pretty amazing in general, though the presets are almost invariably mixed too high in the output, and have to be toned down.

No problem so far. I am very careful in transporting it, however, since it is completely made of plastic, and not built for travel.

I got the great price from Guitar Center. They apparently bought the remaining stock from Alesis after it was discontinued. What a deal. Alesis retail was $499, and Musician's Friend had it for $399! I didn't even know it would do delay, and everything else. I thought it was a reverb unit only. So it was a great value. Don't know if I'd pay full retail for it, though. Works well with a MIDI controller pedal. You can assign any effect to any channel, so it actually does pretty well in a live situation.