Novation A-Station

Simple and easy, nice to work with.

Vocoder, about the rest I don't know

I love the novation staff. I own several synths, but I realy dig the a-station, I can program it in no time and get exciting new sounds. I especially like the vocoder on this unit, it sounds better then my alesis micron. You can achieve almost any synthetic sound you can imagine, also it will take a little while for programming.

So far I had no issues with it. It seems to be a sturdy box. Yes I would use it on a gig without backup.

Don't know, never had any problems

If it were stolen, I would get it again. I've been playing for about 15 years. I own a korg wavestation, alesis micron, yamaha mm6, alesis s4, clavia nord electro, novation xio synth.

I love the ease of use, there's nothing that I realy hate about it.
It is a very creative tool for me and inspired me to a bunch of new songs.

Its Split. i could say that its easy because of the font panel. however i could also say its not because of the led menu. You will need a manual for as they put it "advanced" editing. which is really things that youll need regardless. However for its price range what is available in the font makes it about equal when you consider everything.

polophony is low.
effects are decent. once again when you consider the used price these go for there damn good.
no expansion.
my big gripe is no real software editing is available. theres one out there but 99 percent of the time it will not work for you.
the arp is beautiful. great.

well when i got it i was not impressed. it wasnt all that amazing off the bat. but once i read the manual and started making patches i was very impressed. this machine can do alot for its price range. kinda like a nord lead 1 with effects. people will gripe and say what they want but when you consider the price and the size (1u rack space) there isnt much that compares out there to this one. yeah sorry but knocking everything doesnt really make you a synth god. people will knock anything and everything on here. some things deserve it some dont. i feel like this one should have a much higher score. i have found that using two occilators instead of three makes your patch a bit warmer. three tends to become very digital sounding. the fm part is excellent for those who want a lil fm in there setup every once in a while. ive had synth that were real pieces of crap. i bought a sh 201 and returned it within 12 hours. that was crap. considering the closest synth to this is a waldorf micro q(600.000 or a nord lead 1 (600.00) and you can get almost 4 of these for that used. well i think it deserves a bit more props. like i said the editing sucks. however once you get it down like all other synths its a breeze. but dont be lazy and use presets. if your gonna do that why even own a synth?

seems very reliable like the other stations. i own bass,a, and drum.

if i lost it i would get another in a heartbeat. i think they got it down perfect. if it did more it would go for more used wouldnt it?

i also own a jv-1080 which i believe to be the most underrated synth of all time. i got it for 225. a big difference from the 1000+ they sold for new. i try to go for the less trendy gear when buying synths. that way i can get more for my buck. i dont pay more than 300 for a used synth. my bass station is the only one i broke that rule on. it was because analog bass synths arnt cheap anymore. and i perfer digital occilators anyway to voltage occilators. there too unstable for me. i bought this bacause for its price nothing else out there compares. this is a slimmed down supernova. the supernova goes for 600 + . think about that. just because a synth is expensive doesnt ever mean its better. perfect case in point the tb303.

my current list of gear is
mpc2000
roland r-8m
drum station
bass station
a station
roland m-vs1
jv-1080
roland mks 50
ensoniq dp/4
and i didnt pay over 300 for any of them. so dont always listen to the popular opinion. most of the time thats what drives pieces of crap like the korg poly 800 to go for more than a synth like this. dont get me wrong the poly has its good sides. but is it better than an a station? i dont think so.

Not to difficult, reading the manual helps of course. I already have the software version of the A and K, the V station, so I already had one foot on the ladder.
Presets sound great, but I love creating my own or building from the current patches.

Loads of hands on controls! Plenty of knobs. Good midi impletation. Wish it had a software editor though.
Its not multitimbral but thats no skin off my nose. I usually do single track recording anyway.
Very good in-house effects.

Beautiful! I love the liquid filters. This little box can either sound like smooth ice crystals or just plain dirty! Its just fab at producing TB303 sounds. One of the best.
I Have other synths in my arsenal, including an Access Virus TI keyboard, Korg Triton Extreme and a Yamaha MO6. The A station complements all these. As with the Virus, it has a sound of its own and a great one at that.

Yes, without a shadow of a doubt! Solid unit. But its Novation... I would'nt expect anthing less from them.

100% fantastic! I used to own a second hand Supernova II. One of the ends was badly cracked (previous owner) so I emailed Novation to see if they had a replacment.
The postman was knocking on my door the next day with a spare part in a box.
They never asked for money, just my address! Plus they gave me some spare knobs to boot!
Now thats what I called customer service!!!

If it was stolen, I'd hunt them down for sure!
As mentioned above, this complements my other hardware synths very well (and software).
I love almost everything about it apart from the menu's but the quality of build and sound makes up for it 100 fold.
I choose this synth because I already had a V Station (vsti version) and loved the sound of that and previously a Supernova II.
I would love to get TC Electronics Powercore firewire rack unit and if I do, I would also buy the V station on that to. But I would still use the A station, its just a great synth.

Very easy to use

Responds well to touch, This has some nice Analog sounds in it. It can do 303 sounds as well as nice Oberheim string sounds.

Rock Solid

Great synth, forget the price. It has effects and sound great. Only 8 voices, but a welcome addition.

The interface is tricky at first but you do get used to what those digits mean. Got it as soon as it came out.

Nice delay and distortion effects. Upgrading system is easy.

This is a nice sounding synth. Pads and bass are very warm and full sounding. Great for effects.

Like the idea of using flash memory for patch storage, don't need to worry about battery failure or replacement.

Just wish Novation would make patch making software like Korg did with their Microkorg. Did suggest it to Novation but they never replied.

This is a nice sounding synth. And at the current prices would get one again. Not really a replacement for your bass station range as the sound synthesis is different. If you can get around the cost cutting menus style its a bargain for quality sounds. Have used it quite a lot in my music and you can check it out at myspace website- mdx

OS2.1
Without time, patience and a thorough read of the manual it is impossible to unlock the features under the covers. The A-Station provides a limited two-character display. If there were a software editor available, it would probably be much easier to control this synth.
The manual is comprehensive and seems to be complete.

The A-Station is NOT multitimbral, but provides 8 note polyphony.
The A-Station has three powerful oscillators, a low-pass filter, two ADSR envelopes, two LFOs and a good effects section. There are seven effects in total: stereo delay, reverb, chorus/phaser, distortion, auto-pan, EQ and a 12-band vocoder.
1U rack format, MIDI IN/OUT/THRU.

Rich sounds, powerful synthesis. It works well for all electronic music styles (dance, hiphop, trance,...), but is NOT designed for playing natural sounds.

Seems to be solid.

An up-to-date website is available.

For this price, I probably would buy it again.

Lates OS.

Presets.... Let's talk about presets. Many years ago, I would buy a synth and immediately delete all the presets. I would labour night after night on sound design, until my eyes were red and my sequencer fed up from the same loop. Now, this was also in the days before computer editor/librarians, so this was no minor feat to "master the beast." I would assemble an arsenal of original and insane sounds. I have done this for everything from Minimoogs and Prophet-5s through to DX7s and samplers. Eventually, a some things occurred to me. Such as: most of these awesome sounds actually weren't terribly useful in a mix. Sounded great over the monitors at 3AM, but when the song started to come together, the stage started to get a bit crowded, so to speak. So these days, I generally will dial through a box's presets to find something slightly close to what I want, and not worry about tweaking until I get close to tracking. And you know what? There's plenty of useful sonic "departure points" that ship with this machine. And they do a good job of describing pretty much the range of what this box can do. Yes, you can always make hideous and waped sounds with it, and, no, most folks don't ship with that kind of thing. You know why? Because a hideous and warped sound is *only cool if you make it yourself.* Nobody will like someone else's hideous and warped patch (until, of course, it has been immortalized in a distributed recording). Nothing wrong with that. Just an observation.

Now, I do wish there was an editor available for this. Yes, it sure has knobs, and when it comes to the aforementioned tweaking stage, I love this box. But I also wouldn't mind getting an idea of the hows and whats of the patches, and there really isn't an easy way to do that (this is the unobvious benefit of the menu-driven interface--you can actually take a look at the values and routings and understand a bit about what does what). Experimenting with the modulation matrix is not much fun with just the LEDs, so I look at this machine as a "presets I can tweak a bit" box more than a sound design tool.

The manual is great. Would go well with an editor :-)

Polyphony, effects, MIDI, all par for the course. Arpeggiator is fun and surprisingly useful (can't explain it; some arps are just fun and therefoe inspiring).

I know the A Station can send all kinds of controller stuff out; I suppose for live tweaks going to the sequencer it could be quite cool; one rainy day I'll play with that. For now, I use it downstream of my MIDI controllers and sequencers, and use programmable knobs to send tweaks.

The A Station sounds clean, solid, and useable. If it suffers from any weakness, it is that it doesn't sound "alive." It covers all the bases, and produces very effective tones and noises, but it hasn't really surprised me yet. Now, this is a good thing, especially from a studio tweaking point of view. But when I hit a dead end, I often turn to my synths to scramble some sounds, and I haven't really created anything that was particularly unique or unexpected on the A Station. Yet. Maybe I haven't hooked into its engine yet. But there is something decidely "safe" sounding about it. I would sugest that if you are looking for aweful, squelchy burps and howls (al la MS-20), then keep looking. If you are looking for something that is going to sound analog in a musical way, this is really an excellent value, especially if you are not a hardcore programmer.

I have no reason to believe that this would not last on the road if well racked, but I limit my live rig to a few, steel-cased machines, with screws on the knobs, and trust nothing less. More than once I've had to defend myself at gigs with my keyboard, and can't see using this to threaten anyone :-)

Excellent. I've had some knobs fall off, and two days after an email, I had the full chain of their support network posting me replacements with spares, no charge. Thumbs up, folks!

I would replace it; it fills an important niche in my studio. However, I might be temped into something with a less cryptic display (or made entirely of steel) should I find myself shopping; the Roland JP-8080 intrigues me, and if Alesis ever ported its Ion to a rackmount, that also would get my attention. As it stands, I use this thing a lot, and often is the first box I fire up when sketching a song. I have even considered picking up a second one. I looked long and hard at the Korg MS2000 before picking up the A Station, and finally decided that the A Station would be more useful, if perhaps less sonically surprising.

I have been somewhat spoiled by my Nord Modular insofar as sound design goes, and I have a few "real" analogs kicking around (I use my Matrix 1000 all the time), and this machine holds it own (it actually makes the analogs sound kinda muffled). I run percussion loops out of Reason, and use an Korg ESX-1 as a drum machine. I also have a pile of older Yamaha synths (which I love but don't use much), and a couple of Kurzweils for accoustic bits. I have a pile of Akai samplers and Reaktor also. The whole mess is driven by my old Atari, and mixed through an eight-foot high rack of processing stuff (ten years of collecting vintage eq and so on). So the A Station actually is a "main" synth for me, at least as a regularly appearing instrument in my songs.

The only shortcoming that I can really point to is the lack of an available editor, and that's really not a reflection on the synthesizer itself. The sounds this thing makes will pump, swoop, boom, and blip to your heart's content. It may not scare you, but that's not for everyone, now is it?

It took me a few hours to really get into using this product because of the lack of screen.. Presets sound fab - although the purpose of this synth is not to use the factory presets, but to create your own sounds.

There seems to be everything packed into this box.. I'v had mine a few days now, and feel like I'vonly scratched the surface. Please note though that this module does not have any acoustic instrument patches.. and was never intended to be able to have any!

The Pads are so good.. with a good stereo setup or a nice pair of headphones they make you fly! It reacts well to playing, however this really depends on the quality of the midi controler. Plugged into my Roland PCA160 it sounded good, but going through my Clav - it was awesome.

Han't broke yet! I intend to gig with it without backup.

Never used customer support.

I'v been playing keys for 6-7 years now and a Roland RS-50. I'v found that the Novation / Roland setup complement eachother perfectly... Roland for it's pianos, organs, rhodes, and complete bank of instruments, and the novation for those KidA style electronic pads and effects. Definitly worth every penny.

OS1.1

Some of the Presets sound a but weak to my ears - but then I like big brash distorted fucked up noises - it's easy enough the edit them into great sounds. Havn't played much with creating sounds from scratch as I don't have the time. Would probably use the Software version as an editor If I did. It's a bit hard to keep track when each knob does loads of stuff. The manual's great though.

8 voice polyphony - for what I use it for - Techno leads - that's fine. Have so far only sequenced it from an MC-303 so not much experience of how if responds to complex midi commands - the manual suggests it does. Wicked effects.

See above - I've not had the change to evaluate the expressivness, but the sounds are nice - when I said they seemed tame before that by no means means they're not good. The effects are not going to beat a top range unit, but do the job.

HAs been a bit wierd once or twice - refusing to change to a certain sound. Also not quite sure how it choses which patch the boot up into...

HAve done one gig with it and it seemed fine. Doesn't seem to hiccup when you change patches - with the buttons at least.

Not tried. Their computer system was down when I was ordering through the Sound Control in Leeds, but the lovely shop assistant there said if I didn't mind the box being open I could have hers (she'd just brought the last one in stock) and she'd wait so I could have it for christmas.

Would definately get another if it got nicked - was just what I needed for the money I had. I though about getting the KStation - rack, but figured didn't quite have the cash - not too worried though - I don't really need four of them, not 'cos of any versitility issues, just 'cos I'd get drumsounds instead.

I didn't actually use it much for about 9 months 'cos I got out of live music - kicked myself when I started again for what I was missing out on.

I just bought this, and am using OS 1.1 patch editing is easy most of the time, although the manual (which is very clear and well put together) is a constant companion at the moment, especialy when using the Shift Function.

This unit is 8 voice poly, the effects are very versatile, although editing them is a bit tricky with all those 2 letter abreviations ! but I guess I will get used to it. Midi is quite comprehensive, transmits knob data as well. The arpegiator is very inspiring, although it can crash ocasionally when playing lots of chord changes and high notes.

There are some good sounds among the presets, but the editing potential is where this unit really shines, their is a lot of power lurking under those knobs and buttons, put in a few weeks with this and you will be well rewarded. On first use I was scared it was going to sound too digital, but it sounds fine to me, not obviously hard or cold, the sounds are well rounded with a nice "bloom" to them.
This machine will please most people I should imagine, from experimantal to dance and everything in between, as the old synth ads used to say, "the only limit is your imagination" :) I use this in a free improv band, so it is going to travel to the outer limits most of the time :)

Dont know, only had a it a few days, I live in England so if anything does go wrong I am quite local to Novation, which could be handy.

Not aplicable.

This is simply great for the price, I cant complain at all, I am thinking of buying another. The build qaulity s not bad at all, it is solid and heavy (wall wart is a bit of pain though) I think that Novation have got it right here, OK so their may be some bugs, but I have spent a lot more on synths from other manufactueres that have had serious software problems, we all expect more and more from makers these days, and they are struggling to keep up, you have to make the choice, do you pay inflated prices for old analogue gear or invest in new technology, after spending fortunes on repairing my ageing PRO 5 and Moog, I am definatly going to start moving over to modern instruments.