Alesis QS8.2

I feel it is very easy to use. The buttons are labeled well and it is easy to find a sound.

This is a straight synthesizer, not a workstation. For what it is, it stands up with Roland, Korg and Yamaha synths. Polyphony is 64 notes, which is plenty. I wish Alesis kept the same number is Q Card slots, or perhaps added a couple more.

The keyboard has velocity, but no aftertouch. This is not a big deal to me. The sounds are awesome in my opinion. Ii used to own the following gear: Korg Triton Extreme, Yamaha S80, Yamaha Motif 7, Roland XP-80, Roland Fantom X7, Ensoniq VFX and a Kurzweil K2000. Of all those boards, the Alesis has the best OVERALL quality sounds out there. In my opinion per sound type, the Korg has the best synth sounds, the Yamaha has the best "natural" acoustic sounds and the Roland is the middle ground. The Korg sound is cold to me, the Roland is thin and the Yamaha is pretty full and warm. The Alesis has excellent organs, strings, pianos and synth sounds. The bottom line is all these boards sound good through the right equipment. The audio output is 24-bit, 128x oversampling (versus the 8.1 with 18-bit) and really sounds dynamic, powerful and full bodied. I compared the two side by side and noticed the difference.

Never had a problem with any of the Alesis products I ever owned.

I would buy another one. In fact, I used to own a QS 7.1 and regretted selling it. So, I bought an 8.2

The Preset Pianos are great, but only in stero, tried playing mono at a gig and they sucked, but ran stereo big difference on this board. Pianos,organs, elec pianos great, brass ok( not as good as yamaha),strings usable.

Action ok for 1000 keyboard, effects kind of difficult to use, decent leslie for organs

synths real expressive, but horns dont have expressiveness as yamaha when you hit them harder

Has never acted up!

yes would buy again just for preset patches great for gigging, not for techy person wanting own samples

Although the presets sound really good, they could have done a better job with the user interface for editing patches and mixes. The manual is good, but could use some improvement.

The weighted keyboard action is about what you'd expect for a thousand dollar unit. It's nothing to write home about. It's fairly diffucult to get the hang of editing the effects in the multi-timbral mix mode. It's too bad, that there is only one ROM card slot, but there are a lot of good internal sounds.

The internal organ patches are killer. The acoustic and electric pianos vary in quality. It has lots usable string, horn and synth patches. Since it has a variety of nice drum samples, that is a nice extra.

If you plan to gig with it, buy a good road case for it. It seems like it won't take much of beating.

For the money, you can't beat it.

8.2 Awkard to use somewhat, I don't find it particularly intuitive. It seemed like a good deal at the time, but I think I should have gone with Roland or Yamaha.

The Q card I was supposed to receive as a promotion never arrived. What did arrive was an envelope with an invoice for the Q-card.
When I contacted them (after they blow you off repeatedly)was that the Q card was sent to me and that there was only 1 Q card per promotion. Apparently someone in the packing process neglected to pack the thing! The effects are (I find) difficult to manipulate)

Ok sounds, I do worry about getting spare parts from these people. They went out of business once and were re-purchased once before. I wouldn't be surprised given my experience with these idiots that they go out of business again. I bought this synth with a big retail discount ( I work at a music store who is an Alesis Dealer.) When I first approached the store manager about purchasing one, he bemoaned what a "pain in the ass" they were to deal with. The case is really cheap plastic, where the old ones (QS8.1) were a metal case.

I'd hate to have to get parts from Alesis. They don't respond to emails, until about the 3rd time, and are very "abrupt" on the phone.
By the way they don't even offer a Toll Free number for their customer's. It's your dime while they put you on hold and Transfer you to another party.

Rude,rude and incompetent! Avoid making a purchase if you are expecting any competent,professional people. They screw up and infer that I am "scamming" them on a Q-card promotion! Pissed me off!

I'll buy from a competitor next time around. After the sale is when you find out what kind of company your dealing with. I hate to say this but we must all thank "GOD" for the Japanese! It's scary how stupid and rude American companies have become!

This is the new line of the QS serie from Alesis. It is a whole step back. They cut everything: this board has no aftertouch!!! It also has only one pcmcia card slot. It is easy to use if this means selecting the sounds, but it is harder to program because the new "greater" display isn't in fact greater then the old one. It is similar to the display on korg x3 or n364. It is bigger but it is basically a 2x16 character display: no graphic view. The most difficult part to edit are the effects. There are so many keyboards out there on the market with logical effect structures, but alesis went its own way, and it is the most stupid one you can imagine. My english is to bad to explain it but it is simply everything but easy and logical. Another bad point is the velocity: you have only 3 velocity curves to choose from and it is really hard to acommodate the keys to your playing style. Ease of use: very easy to choose sounds and very hard in some aspects of programming.

Well, very poor features. I'm pretty sure that I'm not subjective in this part and I'll try to proove it. The effects are comparable to synths from the Korg M1 era. Imagine, there is an EQ effect. It has to bands, a low and a high band (3-10 kHz). Very poor but this is not all. You can only boost the frequencies, you can't cut them!!! There are I think 5 effects in this board (a triton has over 100): reverb, delay, chorus/flange, distortion, leslie simulator. You can't choose whatever effect you want, they are prearranged in 5 configurations. So, if you can't for example aply leslie and eq for an organ because there isn't such a configuration out from the factory.
There are only 3 velocity curves in global mode: for weighted keys, for synth keys and a fixed maximum velocity; great Alesis! A really god job! In program mode you can put together up to 4 multisamples, layer them or split them. Cool, but if you want to make a multivelocity patch with soft strike samples and hard strike samples it is possible, but you can't choose at what velocity level it will switch from one sample to the second or third. Now if I use together a soft rhodes sample and a hard rhodes sample I cannot choose the velocity ramp, all I can do is to acommodate my playing style. Man, this sucks bit time. As I said no aftertouch, you can import samples via a pcmcia card up to 8 Mb.

There are some people rating the sounds very high. It is better rated than a triton or a phantom. Ok, this is really a subjective part, but if somebody says that everything sounds very realistic to him than I think he never hears something else. I don't expect gigasampler quality from the sounds but for me there are just few pasable sounds:

the pianos ar ok, in fact I like them
the ep's are generally not so good to me: I like the ep's from my triton much better.
the strings are bad; they are very hursh, try to play chords with them: it is not sounding good.
Somebody like the acoustic guitars: really poor samples. Even if a lot of people think that the a. guitars on a triton sucks, they are definitely better sampled.
Brass - not good: thin saxes, trombones, a little better horns.
Woodwinds - very poor
Organs - they don't have the bit like the triton

I play on my gigs mostly acoustic emulations, I don't expect an extraordinary sound, I don't expect a real sax or brass or guitar but a lot of keyboard with the same amount of waverom does it much better. My old korg t3 kills the QS in every aspekt but for the piano sounds.

As I said, I don't expect a guitar, sax or clarinet sound for performing a classical piece, I know the limitations of sampling but a whole range from yamahas entry level psr keyboards has better samples.

I don't know yet

I wouldn't buy it again. It is cheap comparable to some other stuff but this is also the truth: there is a difference betwee a cheap car and an expensive one.
I also have a Roland JV-1010 and I'll try to control it from the alesis. The manual don't say anywhere (and some people say it is better written than any roland or korg manual) how to send bank and program change numbers!

At the end: Alesis is selling an old and outdated piece of gear that can't compete with anything out there except with the price.
I would recommend everybody to try out the synth before you buy it.

General use? Easy. Same as QS8 (though with larger LCD) & 8.1. Editing patches and adding new sounds is a different story (long and hard process). But playing and selecting sounds and general configuration is easy.

There are far less features in this edition of the great QS series. The QS8.2 has half the I/O (no serial port, only one PCMCIA slot, no ADAT i/o, no aux outs), half the expansion (with one less card slot, you can only expand another 8MB of samples). I don't know why Alesis has decided to cut down all the features on the "newer" models. Don't buy the QS8.2. Buy the QS8.1 or the QS8.

Great sounds if you like presets. Great sounding pianos. Decent for most genres. Good expressiveness. Could use aftertouch, pedals and sliders more in the presets, but you can configure these if you so choose.

My QS8 seems reliable and quite sturdy, but I wouldn't take it anywhere for fear of damaging it (personal choice, not to reflect badly on the unit). It's not particularly easy to damage the QS8 but the newer QS8.2 seems to have a different build, and since Alesis is cheapening the QS series this time around, I imagine the hardware is less tolerant of abuse as well.

Alesis is a typical synth company. Not very customer oriented. They aren't interested in maintaining their site correctly (broken links off main page), maintaining their software (relying on Roland's serial driver now, among other things), or in doing anything new with these QS synths except removing features and selling them as "new versions." But I've had no problems with my hardware (QS8) and therefore have never tested Customer Support.

This is a pale follow-up to a great set of entry-level professional keyboards. The QS8 and QS8.1 are far better and more valuable keyboards, especially if you're interested in options. The QS8.2 lacks a lot of options previously found in the QS series. I do not recommend it, especially since you can find used QS8 or QS8.1 units on eBay for less than a new QS8.2. Alesis should have improved and added, not removed, features. Why they have done this is anyone's guess. Surely cutting costs is one reason, but still doesn't make much sense to me from a synth-lover's perspective.

Like QS 8.1.

This is like the QS 8.1 but with only 1 expansion slot. Since I use two cards, I did not upgrade to the 8.2

The same great build-in sounds as the QS 8.1.

I decided not to upgrade to this unit because it has fewer features than its predecessor, the QS 8.1: it has one expansion slot instead of 2 and seems to only have one expression pedal input instead of two.

Alesis should update the QS 8.x line by making a unit with 2 expansion slots, built-in sample and sequence memory (instead of wasting a slot for a PC-MCIA memory card), an arpeggiator, a MIDI sequencer and a more user-friendly display. They should also not limit the addressable memory on expansion cards to 8 Mb (you buy a 64-Mb card and it only sees the first 8 Mb). Hopefully they could do this and still compete based on price; the 8.1 is by far the best weighted- keyboard synth. in the $1000.00 range because of its large number of exceptional sounds and its (user-hostile) programmability.