Novation A-Station

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.

OS used 1.0

The A-station features a lot of knobs and the basic parameters is easy to edit. The effect section and some more advanced features require a bit deeper editing, with only a two digit display! It's a bit tricky, but you'll soon get a hand for it.

Enough voices, but it is just monotimbral, pitty... Ok effect section.

WAKE UP EVERYBODY! Most reviews here says that this thing sounds really good. Someone even gave it a 10... This was the first "real" analogue synth I bought, but I wasn't really satisfied and purchased an Access Virus rack classic instead. I bought the A-station brand new, but the virus second hand, and paid about the same for both (500 USD). If I rate the Virus a 10, the A-station will maybe get 3. It sounds okay and have some cool sounds, but why buy it when you can get so much more for the same money? I like some lead sounds and basses, but the pads are horrible.

Works fine.

Don't know.

As mentioned above, this isn't a monster synth. But, every sound has it's place. You can't make a good tune by just layering ten of the fatest sounds you can find, it would just be a mess. Sometimes, very often indeed, you need to use different kind of synths in your tunes to get a well balanced mix. For that reason every synth is usable somewhere. What synth you prefer also depends a lot on what music you wanna create. The fact that the synth is just monotimbral indicates that it's ment to be used as a complementary device to other equipment. Not as the "central hero" in your setup.
The A-station is pretty okay but you could get so much more...

Lots and lots of nobs on this, plus a 2 digit led. Nigh on impossible without the manual to get into the guts of it, difficult with it. Come's with 200 editable presets and another 200 spare for storing. Not the most friendly of interfaces and considering it was fisrt ever synth, pretty damn off putting.

Monotirmbral, which was dissapointing. But it has a load of effects a vocoder, arpegiater, 3 oscilators, midi sync and loads of other stuff.

This is where it really shines. The presets are great and nearly all usable, plus they can be edited. Using the onboard distortion on this fella gives you some really fat sounding leads and basses. The pads, strings and organs are lovely and you get get some truely impressive noises out of it.

Had a few problems early on. Haven't gigged with it yet, but will be doing so soon.

N/A

I bought this eighteen months ago as my first rack mounted synth, since then i've got a waldorf xt, a emu virtuoso 2000 (plus mophatt and techno roms) and a ER1. I've been making music for around 16 years of all mainstream styles (pop, rock, metal, funk) This is one of the synths i nearly always use on any track i'm making it so versetile. I recently got the v-sation plug in which now means i can use more than one in a track. This means i've been able to remove it from my rack to play live and make way for a new access rack. Considering these are now going for around half what i apid for it they represent excellent value for money.