Be honest — would you rather be in Britain at this time of year, or California. Paul Wiffen does the right thing, and brings hot news back to a cold climate.

Another year, another Winter NAMM. However, the really big buzz at this year's show was not product-related. Although no official announcement has yet been made, it looks like the Summer NAMM is now history. Attendance has been steadily dropping off for years as the Winter NAMM has been going from strength to strength (this year there was a whole new hall and there still wasn't room for all the would-be exhibitors). A last ditch attempt to keep the flagging Summer show alive by moving it to New York and having a public day has still not brought the necessary commitment from the exhibitors.

Nobody in the NAMM organisation seems to know what to do to boost attendances at the Summer show. Of course, if they asked any of the Winter show attendees what persuaded them to come, they would soon get an answer: Californian weather; Californian scenery (if you know what I mean); and Disneyland is just across the street.

ALESIS

Anyway, if there was a buzz product at the show it was surely the Alesis ADAT, an 8-track digital tape recorder previewed in an early form. It uses Super VHS video cartridges as a recording medium, recording at 48kHz with 64-times oversampling, and the sampling frequency is continuously variable between 42.76kHz and 50.85kHz, which gives a facility to vary pitch. The unit has 1/4" connectors for its -10dB inputs, and +4dB signals can be brought in via a standard 56-pin ELCO connector. ADATs will feature a proprietary digital interface which will allow them to interface and sync together with 1-bit accuracy, and there will also be an AES/EBU interface available. Suggested US dollar list price is $3,995. There will also be a remote, and you can link up to 16 ADATs together via SMPTE. The bad news? Don't hold your breath. Alesis aren't promising to ship until the end of the year.

Alesis' remaining products were obviously outshone by the ADAT, but they also had a drum module, the D4, which boasts 400 drum sounds (many of them stereo) in a single rack space. Besides operating as a MIDI module, the unit also has six audio trigger inputs for drum pads or stereo drum replacement (with velocity control).

EMU

Emu were showing something similar in the Procussion module, which could perhaps be described as a Proteus full of drum sounds. But the really interesting Emu product was one shown only to distributors — a velocity and pressure sensitive keyboard which uses Proteus technology in combination with an EIII-type sequencer and on-board signal processing (a first for an Emu product) to create a performance/workstation instrument that should sell for around £1500. Hopefully the machine will be more publicly shown at Frankfurt.

Also new, and on full public show, was the EIIIX, a rack-mount unit which can be used either as an EIII expander or a stand-alone unit. It features 32-voice polyphony and can be expanded to 32MB using industry standard SIMMs. Although no exact price was available, expect to pay around five grand in the UK.

ROLAND

Amongst Roland's usual crop of new products (is there anything they don't make now?) were two units of particular interest. The S750 sampler is just the thing for those who have been gazing with longing, but insufficient funds, at the S770. The module significantly reduces the price you will have to pay for the same superb sampling facilities as the S770, by removing the hard disk (although SCSI allows external drives to be connected), digital in/out, and two of the S770's 10 audio outs. However, it still has version 2.0 software which allows timestretching and resampling, the ability to expand to 18MB, and 24-voice polyphony.

For years now synthesists have been screaming for something more than a single data entry slider on their synths, and one manufacturer at least has been listening. Roland have taken the one-slider-per-parameter system that survived on their plugin programmers, and put it back on the front panel of a new instrument, the JD800 keyboard synth, a major instrument that combines the best of both analogue and digital. But the JD800 is an old-fashioned synthesist's dream for other reasons too. For the first time, it makes modern techniques involving PCM waveform sources (as well as all the traditional waveforms) and on-board signal processing available within a real analogue-style synth environment. I heard modern sounds as well as sounds I haven't heard for years.

GREATEST HITS OF ANALOGUE

Another company going back to their roots was Oberheim (now part of Gibson). Their OB-M is like a 'greatest hits of analogue'. The two sources per voice are discreet analogue oscillators with sync, pulse width mod and FM. These are summed together with external audio and noise through a mixer into two parallel filters. One of these is a subtle copy of the classic MiniMoog filter, and the other is the original SEM 2-pole filter. The two filters are then summed through 'filter position' (a sort of stereo mix of the two) or filter select. There are three LFOs and four envelopes. The poly-mod section (sound familiar, Prophet owners?) allows oscillator FM, PWM, and cross-mod. Besides processing external audio, you can also control the unit from an acoustic instrument via a mono pitch tracking function. Price varies with the number of voices required, but a 12-voice module should retail for under $5,000.

PEAVEY

Peavey were showing the DPM2 (a budget version of their excellent DPM3 keyboard) and the new SP sample player, which follows in the tradition of the Oberheim DPX1 by reading disks from other samplers. Unlike the DPX1 however, it is full 16-bit and fits into 1U of rack space.

The integration of hard disk recording and sequencing continues apace. Both Steinberg and Mark Of The Unicorn announced support for Digidesign hardware within their Cubase and Digital Performer. Each can add two tracks of digital audio within a sequencer running on a Mac II, in a similar manner to Opcode's Studio Vision.

Sadly, due to the fact that C-Lab and Digidesign are no longer working together, and that Digidesign are no longer actively developing the Atari version of Sound Tools (now the Mega STs have been discontinued), Notator HD is no longer being developed, and you will not be able to perform the same tricks with Sound Tools on an Atari. However, on the Atari stand both C-Lab and Steinberg sequencers were being demonstrated recording and playing back stereo audio to the Plasmec D2D ADAS hard disk recorder via internal MIDI triggering.

Finally, Atari themselves had a new product on show for the first time, to replace the Mega 1, 2 and 4 computers. The new Mega STE comes complete with built-in 40MB hard drive, 2MB of RAM (expandable to four) and a sleek new styling. At around £1000 in the UK, it's the best-looking Atari yet!