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AKAI AX 80:+ untested + 110 volts versionSOLD AS IS – NO RETURNSWhen Akai turned up at the 1984 Frankfurt Music Fair, they had many people wondering what a hi-fi manufacturer was doing at a show aimed squarely at performing and recording musicians. A fully fledged polysynth, the AX80, garnered the interest of onlookers and bystanders. It was sleek, black, beautifully designed, beautifully finished and, if looks could kill, was set to become The Terminator of its generation. Indeed, if high quality castings, slick plastic mouldings, and a highly polished wooden finish that wouldn’t look out of place on a Steinway turn you on, the AX80 is still the synth for you. Technically speakingIn some ways the Akai was a true analogue instrument, with sixteen oscillators and a maximum polyphony of eight notes. The oscillators were VCOs (voltage controlled oscillators) rather than DCOs (digitally controlled oscillators) thus making the AX80 more closely related to classics such as Sequentials and Oberheims than to rivals like the Roland JX-series. Indeed, the chips were made by Curtis ElectroMusic (CEM) – the same company that produced the oscillators used in later Prophet 5s. On the other hand, secondary sound creation facilities such as the envelopes were calculated digitally. This ‘hybrid’ arrangement was identical to that of, for example, the Prophet 600.The AX80 offered 32 preset sounds, plus 64 memories that you could freely edit. The keyboard was five octaves wide and velocity-sensitive, although it lacked the responsive feel of its contemporaries the Roland JX8P or the Yamaha DXs. Yet despite its analogue heritage, the AX80 employed a novel implementation of digital parameter access editing, and part of its high quality design was to make this often obtuse editing system clear and easily understandable. It did this by echoing Yamaha’s 9,500 monster, the DX1. Each parameter had a fluorescent blue LED bar-graph that responded to the editing controls. Since, when you selected a patch, all the parameter values lit up, it was almost as easy to ‘see’ the sound on an AX80 as it was on a knobby synth such as a Roland Juno 106 or Jupiter 6.It was in many ways quite an advanced synth. For example, whereas many of its low-cost contemporaries were struggling by with a single low frequency oscillator, the Akai’s four LFOs independently controlled the pitch of oscillator 1, the pitch of oscillator 2, the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter, and the rate of oscillator 1’s pulse width modulation. Similarly, whereas many competitors offered just a single ADSR envelope, the AX80 incorporated two envelope generators (EGs) for each of its eight voices. These were implemented in an odd arrangement in which EG1 and EG2 controlled the VCA and VCF respectively (the volume and the tone of the sound) or EG1 (in its VCA/VCF mode) controlled both aspects, much as the envelopes of a more limited synth would do.The oscillators themselves produced sawtooth, squarewave, and mixed saw+square waves. They offered a sub-oscillator on OSC1, detune and two types of cross-modulation on OSC2, independent volumes, and the ability to modify the pitch of OSC2 by applying either the VCF envelope or the VCA envelope. Each voice also incorporated a traditional low-pass filter that offered the basic controls of cut-off frequency and resonance, and that could track the keyboard so that higher pitched notes were brighter than lower pitched ones. This, of course, mimics the responses of many natural sounds such as those produced by guitars and pianos. You could also modify the filters’ cut-offs using their dedicated envelopes, and by the velocity with which you struck each key. There was even a simple high-pass filter, and this removed bass frequencies and thinned the sound if desired. It all sounds like gobbledygook? Unfortunately, a long list of features often does, but it meant that the AX80 was, in principle, a very flexible synthesizer indeed.On the performance side, the AX80 sported twin pitch-bend and modulation wheels, but also allowed you to limit the maximum amount of bend or wobble applied to the sound. Other plus points included a chord memory that reduced the synth to monophony but enabled you to play chords with one finger, and a pedal input that allowed you to step through the programs in a bank.So how did these facilities fit together? Offering 54 parameters per patch, the AX was capable of some neat tricks. For example, the velocity with which you hit a key could control the pitch of OSC2. You set this up by making one of the envelope generators velocity-sensitive and routing it to the oscillator. Then, if you selected one of the cross-modulation options, the tone of the note – rather than its pitch – became velocity-sensitive. You could conjure further sonic oddities by winding up the resonance until the filter itself began oscillating. Since the filter tracked the keyboard unevenly (unlike for example, that of the Roland Juno 60) you couldn’t use it as a scaled sound source, but if you mixed it with the conventional oscillators it produced some off the wall sounds that changed timbre dramatically as you played different parts of the keyboard.
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Category: Musical Instruments:Pro Audio Equipment:Synthesisers and Sound Modules
Location: COLOGNE