ALESIS HAVE BEEN making quite a name for themselves over the past few years. The Alesis Micro series of FX units have found a tidy niche in the home recording market and the HR16 drum machine and the MMT8 sequencer are doing very nicely, thank you. When the Midiverb was released on an unsuspecting public in early’86 it offered MIDIselectable digital stereo reverb at a budget price. In’87 the Midiverb II won several industry awards and it is still being snapped up by professionals and amateurs alike. Well, if it weren’t for the risk of being accused of flogging a name to death, that could well have been the title at the top of this review. QuadraVerb, however, tells us a little more about the unit and marks Alesis’ entry into the MIDI-controllable simultaneous multi-effects processor market – even if you can’t say it without pausing for breath. What’s a multi-effects processor, you may ask. It’s a unit which can produce a variety of different effects: one minute it could be a reverb unit, the next it could be creating delays. There are already several units on the market which do this. And a simultaneous effects processor, if you haven’t already guessed, can produce several different effects at the same time. The idea isn’t totally new. We already have ART’s Multiverb (soon to father the Multiverb II) and Digitech’s DSP 128P, both slightly more expensive than the QuadraVerb. Korg and Yamaha are about to launch new simultaneous multi-effects processors but they won’t give you much change from a grand. A year ago, if you wanted to apply equalisation, delay, pitch change and reverb to a signal you’d have required a lot of individual outboard units and a healthy wallet. QuadraVerb has all four of these effects – plus a bit more.