Freff, our New York correspondent, checks out the American-made J L Cooper Midi Switchbox II.

Excuse me! Time out for a diatribe. A less-than-serious investigative journalist (with spaghetti and snake phobias) could make a serious case for MIDI As International Plot — the conspirators in this case being those greedy capitalists who sell us the infinitude of cables and connectors all electric/electronic musicians have come so vaguely to terms with. Confess: not one in ten of us knows the proper way to coil a cable so its life expectancy stretches beyond next week. Instead we toss them into cardboard boxes or milk crates or road cases, where they tangle like kelp washed up on a beach and start germinating into high-tech Gordian Knots. (Oh God, he's started.)

Enter MIDI. Musical miracle, digital delight, provider of computer-aided prowess to the less than promising. And BRING ON THE CABLES! Little five-pin DIN plugs (only not quite, because some pins have been switched, so of course you have to buy expensive properly-switched cables instead of the commoner, cheaper, garden-variety DIN cables). They sprout from the backs of everything, extending feelers in all directions. They've grabbed all my synths and drum machines. They've seized my home computers. They've locked onto my digital delays and reverbs, with an eager eye out for my mixing board and tape decks.

Nothing is sacred, everything is in jeopardy, and real soon now I'm going to pay for some chiropractor's new car, since it is only a matter of time before I throw my back out or dislocate a shoulder while plugging and unplugging my MIDI cables.

Have you noticed this yet? YOU CAN'T LEAVE ANYTHING WHERE IT IS, WITH MIDI! Just as soon as you figure out how you want the net to work, a new need arises, and you've got to recalculate completely what OUT will go into what IN, what THROUGH will leapfrog where, and... do it. Plug. Unplug. Plug again. And again. And again.

Of course, nobody makes it easy on you by having all three standard MIDI sockets; many synths have no THROUGH jack, some have OUTs that also function as THROUGHs under certain conditions, some of them have OUTs but no INs (incredibly dumb, that). And how can it be a "standard" when the manufacturers can't even agree on whether the socket should have the four pinholes at the the bottom or the top? Having to feel around the backs of everything, connecting cables by braille, is ludicrous.

This completely leaves out the question of why we needed five-pin DIN-type cables anyway, since only three of the pins are used in sending MIDI data. The entire thing could have been implemented using standard, available, durable, XLR connectors and cables. Which we all had already. Why wasn't it? One company tried: Octave Plateau, makers of the Voyetra Eight polysynth (and "Sequencer Plus", the best MIDI software I have yet seen). These days O-P are in the dubious position of having to sell special custom-made XLR to MIDI cables so that Voyetra owners can hook up to other MIDI gear. Sure it's silly, but the rest of the industry went with making us buy all kinds of new cables and hook-ups and interfaces.

Why? Conspiracy? Accident? Alien menace? A technician named Fred who hardwired the first prototype? You tell me.

End of diatribe. Sorry about that, but I've needed to vent my spleen on that subject for ages, ever since the day I totalled up my first purchase of the umpteen different lengths of MIDI cable you have to keep around if you're going to get creative with the possibilites offered by MIDI's semi-standard standard (something like Hubble's Variable Constant, astronomy buffs).

The equipment in my little studio varies from week to week, depending on who's in and what project is going on to tape, but there's invariably a lot of MIDI gear. Right now there are four computers, seven synths, two drum machines, various MIDI-to-something or something-to-MIDI converters, and one or two controllers. That's a hell of a network to keep track of, and since invariably you end up doing something different for each track, pushing the cables around translates into a lot of pure, simple gruntwork. (Which in my cramped space isn't easy.)

Enter the subject of this review, the J L Cooper MIDI Switchbox II. In a single word: heaven.

It's a simple black box, rackmount style, with six buttons to one side and a 16 character alphanumeric display, under which are 16 more buttons. (The six are labelled REMOTE, MODE A, MODE B, IN PORT, IN CHAN, and FILT CHAN. The 16 are just numbered 1-16.) And what this black box does is, it takes eight MIDI IN ports and connects them to any or all of 16 MIDI OUT ports — juggle the whole net, you see? — and it can store up to 16 such setups in battery — backed RAM, for recall at the touch of a button.

This is a fairly glorious kind of thing, not the least of which because it works exactly as advertised. Simply. (Proof: the manual is only five typewritten pages, and if you actually know anything about MIDI you can skip at least two of those.)

Here's a basic look at operations. The 16 display character buttons are marked ASSIGNMENTS. When you power the unit up, the numbers you see in the display show which IN port is assigned to which of the 16 OUTs. At first, you'll just see a string of Ins, because that's the default — all OUT ports linked to IN port 1. In this standard, MANUAL mode (as they call it), changing assignments is as easy as pressing one of the ASSIGNMENTS buttons. Press button 12 five times, for example, and you've just switched it to connect with IN port 6. So, the first easy aspect of operation: you can tell from a glance at the numbers just exactly what your assignments are (0 is no assignment, by the way — the same as unplugging the OUT port in the back).

That's what happens in MANUAL mode. To store and call back network presets, you need to toggle the unit into PROGRAM mode by pressing the MODE B button. An LED on the button lights up to let you know you are in that mode, and not any other.

Time to create a MIDI network preset. While still in MANUAL mode, go down the row of ASSIGNMENTS buttons, linking the INs to the OUTs as you please by cycling through the numbers. When you want to store a network into memory, just press MODE B, and then hold down FILT CHAN and press any of the ASSIGNMENT buttons. The number on the button you press is the number of the memory slot for that preset. Again, simple (although there's a tad of confusion in the button name; FILT CHAN does nothing at all but allow you to store things in memory, and in the slim manual they admit that the label is left over from an earlier, nonprogrammable version).

Having created a network preset, you call it back while still in PROGRAM mode by pressing the number button you used to store it.

So — two modes. In one, you can set up anything you want by pressing the ASSIGNMENTS buttons. In the other, you can flash back and forth among network presets with the same direct commands.

And that's the box, really. Additionally, you can set the Switchbox II up to step through the MIDI network presets in its memory on receipt of MIDI program change data. That's done using the Remote, IN PORT, and IN CHAN buttons.

Press IN PORT, and the leftmost ASSIGNMENT character shows you the MIDI IN port on the Switchbox that is currently being monitored for incoming program change data. To change it, just hold down IN PORT and press the first ASSIGNMENT button until you see the number of the IN port you'd rather use. That done, select the MIDI channel you'd like to monitor in exactly the same way, except you use the IN CHAN button instead.

Lastly, you can toggle the unit between accepting and not accepting program change data by pressing REMOTE. When the REMOTE LED is on, it will accept such data, the nifty thing here is that you could program the box so that from one controller you could step through a whole string of different networks, right along with changing synth presets. (Or you could record a track of program changes in MIDI sequencer software and root it exclusively to the Switchbox II, wringing changes in MIDI arrangement of your synths and drum machines without ever having changed their sounds.)

The MODE A button is cute. It doesn't do anything — at least, for now.

It's a great and extraordinarily useful box. If you've got past the two-synths-as-one stage of MIDI, and are into networking, it would probably be invaluable. If nothing else it spares you all the tedium of cabling and uncabling your different boxes together... until the day you need more than eight INs or 16 OUTs, anyway.

Or, perhaps, 16 memories. If I have any quibbles with the Switchbox II, it's memory versus money. At a retail price direct from the manufacturer of approximately $1100, having only 16 presets is a bit dodgy. Of course, the arguments on the other side are that these aren't being mass-manufactured, so per-unit construction cost is greater, and that more than 16 memories would blow the elegance of the control schemes. But still, more memory would be nice. The J L Cooper units are continually changing and expanding, as different MIDI interface problems get met and solved, and I suspect this will be no different.

And in the meantime, it solves a problem and fills a need (my problem and my need, anyway), while being cheaper than a chiropractor. And if it attracts enough attention, I'm sure the big players like Yamaha and Korg will be out with their cheaper versions, eventually. Highly recommended.

CONTACT: J L Cooper, (Contact Details).