Alesis QSR

Soft. Vers. 1.02
I have the Vintage Keyboards and Sanctuary cards; therefore organs, ep, choirs, and synth sounds are great.
Editing is like a labyrinth without an editor (Soundtower's is very cheap), but if you have got one, your life will become wonderful.
The manual is clear and clever

Use it always in the "mix" mode , and you will find a big friend for your music out.
The effects are good, and the four separate ouputs are convenient.
The cards which I own are really great.
Midi implementation is complete (I use Sonar 6.2)

From my point of view ih has four higlights: basses, organs, eps, synth, strings and drums are good, I don't like its piano, but in general it is sufficient.
You can play rock and pop, and jazz too, without problems.
I play it with a masterkeyboard (Oberheim MC 2000) and i find it very reactive.

The external power unit is a bad thing for gigging, I have another one.

There are many user's websites with a lot of advices, sounds etc.

If it were lost or stolen I will search another one, I love it.

super easy to play preset tones, but not to program your own sounds
the manual is very straight forward, but doesnt offer any indepth walk throughs.

64 note polyphony. the effects are pretty lush, but not all of the patches have the same midi paramater controller assaignment (like 93 for reverb ect)
there is a performance mode, in which the sounds are more full, and can have multiple effects assigned to only one patch. in multi mode, you can use 16 patches but the effects can only be assigned to one channel, but will effect all channels.

pianos were excellent. but then one day i starded getting distortion in them. all of them and only on piano sounds. this is the reason im taking time to write this review. i later met a guy who had a qsr and all of his patches were playing back fuzzy distortion. so i guess its a bug, and alesis doesnt work on these anymore, at least thats what they told me a year ago. but i did get 4 solid years out of it. they were good years.

not very dependable over time
still gig with it, but no piano sounds.

no good, not anymore

buyers beware of people selling these because there sounds pooped out, and alesis no longer will service

I wrote a review of the QS8 which I just sold 4 days ago - You may want to read it. I purchased this unit to replace it.

LCD seems a lot bigger then the QS8 but not necessarily as bright.
Data wheel is the pitts...almost frustrating. The Lexicon PCM500's had this same problem - and they sent out a chip to fix it.

See the other reviews.

In my QS8 review I wrote that it has a few Marque sounds, acoustic sounds are thin/weak, organs and synth sounds are good. I still believe that to be true. I had a lot of emails from people about my review - most agreed, so why did I get the QSR. Well, it layers well with acoustic sounds from my XV-88, and I truly love a handful of sounds.

This unit came with two Q-cards. Eurodance and hiphop and there were another handful of sounds I really liked. Some of the grooves were very nice...definitely invoked a vibe of the genre.

A friend has had one for years, so I figure mine will last too.

Called them once about some ADAT's and they were knowledgeable and responsive.

I'd replace it if lost or stolen. I believe it was worth what I paid for it. Wish the Alpha Dial worked consistently. For a couple of bills you get 64 voice polyphony, a decent user interface, digital outs, two card slots (mine are filled as described above), a good variety of sounds, all in a single rack space. I guess a JV1080 would be the competition - since I already have an XV-88 I didn't look at the 1080.

BOTTOM LINE: Good bang for your buck.

decent presets, I'm a little surprised that their presets sound so much like the GM presets. Good piano though in my opionion. I did A/B comparison to the Roland competition and liked it better.

64 note polyphony. built in effects, two bays for PCMCIA cards. pretty feature packed

works well playing sequences from cakewalk which is about all I use it for.

I'm no midi guru by any stretch but use it with a midi drum mod, midi guitar preamp, and midi vocal harmonizer, all with a lap top using cakewalk and a couple of guitars. The trouble with midi is, if you live by the computer, you die by the computer.

good web page.

overall, I'm very pleased

It's a 1U module after all so you can't expect that much. Thus said though they done a reasonable job, putting a decent easy to read bright screen and a good if not all that accurate jog wheel to move about. I don't like the way it works as a 16 channel synth though. In the multichannel modes you are seriously limited by the effects and editing capabilities you have. Tried once to hook it to my PC but without much luck. The software is OLD and midi is SLOW! Also I have a ram card for it but never managed to put and sounds on it at all.

The effects once you manage to sort out their seemingly illogical behaviour are actually quite good. Def more of a multi-purpose synth rather than spectacular in any one area. Some nice Mix settings but mostly too bizarre/cheesy to use. The editing of sounds isn't that straight forward either with huge menu's to get through. About 5 different Envelopes... all overly complicated if you ask me!

Genrally great. The Piano's SUCK! Nothing compared with the latest Yamaha/Roland offerings. Very thin but then that's a lot down to the limited on board memory. If, like me your serious about a decent piano sound don't buy without a decent Kurzweil or whatever module to. The organs to are pretty poor, not in tone but in playability. Everything else is pretty sweet. The Pads and Drums deserve special mention! Genrally pretty sweet on the whole. That said though it's still a mid 90s GM sound module so what you get out is pretty out of date but for the bread and butter sounds! WICKED!

I gig regularly with it and very soon became burdened by trying to transport it on it's own. Ended up buying a 2U flight bad which is ok but heavy. It's taken a good beating still!
Been using mine for 4 years without any hassle until last week when it started playing up. The backlight stays on but otherwise the module is dead. Then suddenly it will start working fine again for a while and then go. Shame because its been brilliant for so long!

Emailed Alesis straight away and no response at all. I'm dreading the repair bill!

Overall a very honest no frills, hardworking module. A great starting point to build from. Does the bread and butter pretty well and would work very well if put alonside something more specialised like a Proteus etc.

Lots of people write reviews out here (and that's great) but one must read through the attitudes and assess the experience of the writer when weighing their opinions.

I'm a 15-yr old-style synth guy. Cut my teeth on MIDI when it was first implemented and still use controller boards (Oberheim MC-3000 & Roland A-70) and a rack of modules for my sounds.

I've been a daily user of two QSRs for over one year now. Each QSR has a QCard (Vintage Synths & Sanctuary) and a RAM card for holding the extra factory banks and extra user presets.

The QSR's interface is relatively intuitive in its physical operation, although as with all 1-space modules, there's so little real estate that you need good, strong deltoids to do lots of pushing and dialing to get where you want to go. The dial wheel tends to be imprecise but isn't a show-stopper. (The production process isn't rigid, I got both QSRs at the same time and their controls felt slightly different out of the box compared to each other.)

The MIX edit pages are concise and intelligently laid out. The ability to be very specific with what's being played on what MIDI channel, grouping multiple channels to respond to a single channel, and the ability to edit programs from within the MIX environment is very nice. The individual PROGRAM environment is weird - especially editing. Some of the settings aren't organized well, and a few, especially envelope "depth" settings vs. envelope "level" settings are redundant and act on each other. In other words, you can get the same envelope by reversing each of those two settings, but maximizing both of them creates no greater effect than maximizing one. Effects editing is powerful, but the visual real estate makes keeping the manual open necessary - very cryptic lettering on the display. Alesis is one of few who put manuals online in .pdf format - this is nice. The manual really isn't bad, but leaves out some very important things to a MIDI programmer - like what's the SYSEX string to switch to Program mode from Mix mode, or how to you call programs in a different bank in either mode.

The PC-based patch editor that comes-with is junk. Then again, most PC-based generic editors have programming errors and you're playing with your life if you let them talk to your box - you're likely to wipe out patches or cause internal errors in the QSR's software. The QSR accepts out-of-range parameters sometimes and displays them, but at least it doesn't choke or freeze when it does -- it just ignores them.

In summary - for a $500 street-value box I have been able to learn how to get around with the QSR and deal with its quirks.

64 note polyphony, 16-part multi-timbral. Good effects, but you are limited to five "configurations" or combinations of effects -- you can't customize how you drop in and combine effects outside of these 5 basic structures.

OK, here's where my major beefs come in: The cycle-time it takes to change sounds is quick enough in a live situation, but if you send a patch change simultaneously with other MIDI controller info like 10 (Pan) or 7 (Volume) the QSR doesn't buffer and then process that information - it just drops it. This requires you to get creative with your controlling devices and tie up presets (you only get 128 if you don't have a RAM card) on the QSR. I hate wasting a preset on a stock sound I like well enough just because I want it panned or leveled a little different from the factory setting.

Alesis is aware of the above problem, and also knows they have a problem with saving settings to RAM cards. If you save a Mix you're working on to a RAM card, and one or more of the programs in the mix is coming from a QCard or RAM card, it incorrectly stores the those programs one bank off. This means you must "fool" it by storing your programs, assigning them to your mix one bank off in the other direction, and then save - did you understand that? Yeah - very goofy. If you are using waveforms from QCards in a custom patch WATCH OUT when you're saving this stuff on RAM cards, it gets real squirrely. I've called Alesis Tech Support three separate times with problems related to cards, and each time a different guy said "We don't get many people doing what you are trying to do." As if to say, if you're a power user, well, we really just designed it to make sure a simple user had no problem. In my mind, if you advertise a capability and that's what the customer is paying for, it ought to work.

Now, to rebutt myself, for $500 you get a ton of sounds. As a straight-up module with thousands of sounds (when you add cards), this box is still a great value.

Alesis says the planned "life" of the QS series in the market is still another 1 1/2 years. I've asked them to consider a software release to fix the aforementioned bugs. They haven't ruled it out now that they got a buyer (the owner of Numark but its NOT Numark itself) to pick them up off of the floor, but I'm not counting on it.

I love reading the debate out here on quality of sounds between all of the major brands. One guy can sing praises while another curses a company to hell for the same sounds. The QSR produces very rich, very usable sounds. It struggles with the complex instrument types that the sound industry has always struggled with (horns, human voices, etc.) while making some valiant efforts, and excels at all the classic stuff like organs, synths, etc. The editing features are powerful enough for you to tweak all day on one voice and wonder when the sun went down - so you can get pretty close to whatever you're trying to achieve.

Be careful on the QCards. The Piano based QCards don't make a difference enough for the money. I found the Classical Qcard, while offering extra choices, didn't blow me away. Vintage Synths and Sanctuary offer enough new, unique waveforms to justify them (which is why I kept those). I'm not into dance and trance music, so I generally avoid those, but I understand the Qcards based on that style to be good enough if you're into that.

One year of hard, portable use and these QSRs have been very reliable. Once in a great while you get a stuck note or MIDI glitch - par for the course. Turn it off and back on - you're healthy again.

Alesis's website is pretty good for basic information. I usually don't wait long for a live person. They're office staff was gutted when it looked like they were going under and they had to let go of their sound designers and developers -- now they're trying to get them back. I know this because rather than lying or stonewalling, TS personnel has been willing to confess why they can't make you happy. (Alesis: if you're reading - honesty is a pretty good band-aid - don't stop doing that like too many business that already have.)

For the money, I would definitely replace. Shoot, for the money two has been GREAT b/c you get the same polyphony as a Roland XV-? and EMU Proteus 2000 and have the flexibility to stack without running out of voices.

Easy to use. Good manual. This is an extremely useable piece due to it's wide array of sounds. A little trippy to program but well worth it.

Built in effects are Alesis strongpoint. I have the vintage synth and the EuroDance Q cards and with those 2 cards loaded in there at the same time with the factory presets, you have a pretty wide range of sounds.

Has a decent Mellotron Strings but no Mellotron Choir! Can't figure out why they didn't put that in there.The QSR is best for mono leads and ambient washes and evolving sounds. Strictly use it for synth pads. Most other things, EP's, horns etc.. are crap. I have a whole studio full of all kinds of analog and digital gear and I find myself using this more than my Kurzweil K2500. Kurzweil is the most overrated cocky company around and their hardware is crap. Attitude wise they are like the keyboard version of Digidesign. Anyway, Spend some time programming and you'll come up with some really cool shit. That's when this thing comes alive. No bunches of knobs which kind of sucks but there are great waveforms in this box. So what it has no filters. If this is your only piece of kit you are so hating but if you have other shit with filters in it it is kind of nice this one doesn't just becuase it's different. I don't want a full plate of anything. Program it you preset using GM pussy.

Never had it shit on me. It's in my gig rack and I take it everywhere I gig. Watch out for the kind of loose and sloppy midi sockets on the back.

NAAWWW

There are a bunch of folks at Alesis that used to work at Oberheim and they helped make this thing. Need I say more? Better than any assembly line, porno soundtrack, no soul, steamy pile that Roland makes. Other than the JD-800,Roland was cool 1986 and earlier. If I had to choose a favorite 1U rack this would be it. A beauty way to go for 500 bones.

It was a toss up between Korg Trinity Rack, JV 1010 and QSR. The PCMCIA card thing swung it in favour. I tested out QS keyboards before, and thought they sounded great. Then after a while you play it, the rhodes don't seem that great (they're not bad but you yearn for something more). The piano's are ok - they are quite bright though. My opinion - my XG sounds better for drums and bass - the GM mode in the QS series sound weak. You need a patch editor as well full stop. Getting Soundbridge to work was an effort. The manual is so so but wasn't very helpful. Alot of sounds sound really good in performance mode but weak in multitimbral mode. Alesis can't be blamed for that really. They guy who sold it to me said it would be a Lionel Blair trying to get the samples across via Soundbridge and he was right. What a palaver! I have got it working now though. DO NOTE - YOU HAVE TO SWITCH BETWEEN MIDI/SERIAL PC all the time from the front panel - so if you are using e.g. Atari ST for midi and PC for editing - you have to keep going into the menus and moving from one to another - I was really suprised about having to do this and it is very frustrating. Why can't the QS tell which to switch to?
OOOH AND another important point - I bought this for live playing/burning Midi files on to the flash cards. I eventually got it all working - then guess what - you can't play back midi files and your keyboard at the same time. If I had of known this I wouldn't have bought it. Manual does not mention this at all. The QS6/7/8 is different I believe in that you can play piano whilst the Midi file is playing as well.

Built in effects are good - flanger and delay very flexible. But programming them on the front panel is horrendous - like typing out a computer game on a spectrum 48k. Don't even go there. You think JV1010's are bad for editing - try the QS rizzla screen. Most of these synths are the same though - can't expect a big display for #450
The PCMCIA card idea is good - but very fussy about which cards it will take. Transferring sounds can take time over the serial connection and isn't that reliable. Go make yourself a cup of tea whilst it is doing this ( or lunch maybe !) Soundbridge v3 is better but it is not a properly integrated windows program ( recently used files don't appear which is annoying). Would like to be able to load Soundfonts as well - that would be really useful. I haven't tested any of the other cards. I really wished they'd put a proper filter(s) in the unit - but that's why it cost me #450 - you can't have it all.
I was aware of the lack of filters before buying - but the effects make up for it IMOP.

Very subjective all this. You can get board of the EP's quickly. Organs are great. Synths ok but not that useable (filter thing again )Pianos are good enough for me - better than the XG pianos (you'd expect that though). Drums not great - rock drums sound a bit weak and the snare's suck - sorry Alesis!. How do I take down the sustain of one snare? Not easy to work out. Midi files play back more punchier( and lower quality) on my Yamaha xg module. Strings are good,nothing spesh. Reverbs are clean enough. Flexible q2 effects.

It has hung once or twice and I find it switches back to midi when in PC38.4k serial mode. Maybe it's just me?
It has been good on the whole. I'd use it at a gig - another chunky power supply though that looks like a custom Alesis power supply - points off for that Alesis!

They were quite good in helping me out. Considering I bought it second hand they were supportive which was kind of them. I have no gripes with Alesis on this front.

I have a few modules now - technox :( xg:) and the qs. Money was tight. I looked at jv1010's but the lure of samples/flash cards grabbed me. But teh QSR ain't easy to use. You need a computer full stop. Effects are great. I bought this so I could gig with it and play back midi files from the cards ( which I can ) - but you can't play over the top of the midi files ( why not Alesis when you can with the QS6? ). Wish I'd known that. I'm still using it now and determined to get my money out of it. If you were going to use this as a sophisticated drum machine it's great - but trying to map samples/instruments like pianos and stuff is still difficult. Let's face it people - #400 ain't alot for a module - but remember Yamaha samplers are #600 with filters/3 fx/polyphony. If I get my hands on the techno card maybe I might change my mind. If it were knicked no doubt I might go for a jv 1010. But then looking at reviews of that editing on the QS looks a breeze compared to the nightmares people are having with the JV1010's! I still use my Yamaha XG most for the funk/rock stuff - and the QS for the piano.

I hate tiny screens with submenus below submenus. All of these rack synths should have either a built in KVM setup or a computer host program. The data wheel feels flimsy. Fortunately there are several programs on the web for programming this from a computer. I can't imagine setting up drum patches without it. Soundbridge is what I bought this for however, to burn my own cards. hey Alesis, get an editing program out there.

Polyphonic power! Yeah, try setting it up on homemade patches without the shareware. It has two PCM slots for expansion which is why I bought it. I also got the Vintage synth card.

Piano is yucky, sounds like the cheesy Yamaha/Casio keyboards for kids. Haven't tried the QCard one. Didn't buy it for standard sounds, bought it as a sampler using Soundbridge. But I find the shriller sounds, including the piano, come into my Mackie board with high freq end splatter/hiss/fuzz. I doubt its my boards pre's. The sample rate looks to be 22.5K, BTW. The effects, as stated in the manual, are Midiverb II. Use outboard gear. the less internal circuitry this goes through the better. Building layers on factory patches starts adding the splatter into something that sounds to my ear like tape hiss. bleh. Too many synth patches also dissappear trailing a ratty pink noise hiss. I cut the tails and let outboard reverb ring them out.

hasn't died yet.

haven't been exposed

For less then $500 I get a sampler for playing with my own drum loops and oddities, and I can take wav based grooves out to play. I can assign each loop to a different key. I looked at an AKAI with less memeory for the same price that used diskettes for storing sounds, or you loaded from an added cost SCSI CD, and liked the Alesis better. Of course I would have liked the Triton, or the S5000 but I don't have the cash. I'd buy it used again as I have flash card investments now.

Not too difficult to use. The manual pointed out what everything is and what everything does. It requires some work editting sounds from the value knob and edit buttons, much easier from SoundDiver. I'm rather new to editing so I might not be the best to comment on it. What I did was compile a list of all parameters which was helpful. Although not easy to program, it can be done. Since it's not very easy nor is it very hard. i give ease of use a 5. right in the middle.

64 polyphony, 16 track multi-timbral. can be played in Program or Mix mode. Has one user bank (128 patches, 100 mixes) that can be edited. has a display to see menu option or program/mix number selected. Has an 8din connection for computer hook (you'll need a cable to connect to your pc). Midi in, out and thru. normal stereo outs plus two additional auxiliray outs plus headphone out. features are pretty good for this low-end synth.

Well, it sounded much better in the store coming out of stereo speakers than it did coming out of my Peavy KB/A 100 amp. I was not really impressed with the sound. It was just usable. The pianos to me were too bright and tinny. The flute sounded very excellent though. For the GM sounds, my Casio WK1800 sounded better. I was not impressed with the sounds. Although a few bass patches inspired me to write a few funky riffs, I'm not big into funk so how long was that gonna last for me? The horns weren't bad nor were the synthleads. They were all usable but the pianos .. well they hurt me when I played it almost to the point were I couldn't play anymore. It bothered me. I had double the piano's with my Casio's in order to get through it. I'm scoring Expressiveness/Sounds well ... a think a 6

Not really sure I could depend on it. every once in a while I'd get weird sounds just for a second or two. Several times I had to turn it off and on just to make sure it was re-initialized. I didn't have this unit long because I was not overall satisfied, so over the long haul I don't really know how it would hold up. But since I did have to re-init it a few times..... I'm giving it a 5 for relaibility.

Not good. I emailed them about 6 days ago.... still waiting!!!! There was a q-card give-away promo with the purchase of any QS seriers synth. And my salesman told me where to address my letter. I noticed this address was different from the address to where I was to send my registration card, so I called the 1800 number. The woman I spoke with had no clue about the address I was given. Then I told this to my salesman who was to call me back and 2 days later I still didn;t hear back.... So that was it. I brought the unit back for a full refund. lack of support from Alesis on this one. It was not good.

I took it back. Overall I was not satisfied. I was considering either the Roland JV1010 or the Alesis QSR. The jv1010 costing 400 the QSR, 500. The q-card give-away helped me to decide on the QSR, but since I never got the card and found the unit lacking in expressiveness, it went back. From another dealer I purchased the JV1010, took it home and it was much more expressive and 100 dollars less!