Are you digging your space the mostest? Is your ambience amped to the max? Absolutely sure?? Well for those with even the slightest of doubts the suggestion is that you get a little reverb in your life.

The Midiverb is a stereo digital reverb. And it's little. It comes to our world in a small black moulded plastic casing (plus separate mains adaptor box), with blue and white markings, and incidentally fits neatly into a Boss Micro Rack. It operates at -10dB line level although a 0dB conversion is a simple matter.

It gives you pre-delayed, interactive, reflective, refractive non-linear absorption coefficients, gate, reverse gate and vocal plate, and it doesn't even ask you if you want them; it just knows that you do.

We're talking presets. 63 of them, and no questions asked. This is an ideal box for the person who knows more about late nights than early reflections, who prefers a straight 12-bar to a non-linear 12-bit, but who still wants to sound as if he's strummin' it from the darkest dampest depths of an ancient Tibetan Holy Cave: High density reverb, low density brain activity. And let's be honest, most of the time that's all we zany drug-crazed musician types really want at home or on stage.

The presets offer a whole range of room sizes and characters with decay times from 0.2 seconds to 20 seconds. There are also nine gated effects from 100ms to 600ms and four reverse effects from 300ms to 600ms, and there's still nothing to stop you using other outboard gear to give you extra delay or gating if you fancy it.

It can work in true or pseudo stereo — ie two in/two out, for in-line use with a stereo instrument or mixer, or one in/two out when used with the auxiliary send/return of a mixer. For in-line use there's a direct/reverb mix control.

Programmes are selected sequentially by a pair of nudge buttons with the programme number coming up on a two digit LED display. There's no alphameric display to show the name of the programme, so you have to refer to a chart to know where different effects are stored. If you're using it with another MIDI instrument, the two can be linked so that programme changes on, for instance, your synth, will result in programme changes on the Midi verb. The silly thing is that you can't programme which reverb effect is called up for which synth preset; it has to be one to one, two to two, etc, which means that you might end up with gated reverb on your electric piano. Silly. However, there is apparently a small and inexpensive box on its way to put all that to rights.

The real beauty of this unit is that it offers very high quality reverb, with extraordinarily low noise (very important for multitrack work) at an unprecedentedly low price. A definite bargain, and definitely recommended.

ALESIS Midiverb: £395.00