Around the mid to late 80's the 'new-digital' boom was well underway; and the plethora of new budget gear was flooding the market as the home studio boom really took off after the release of the early fostex 8 tracks etc. Quite a few manufacturers responded to the call bringing to the table a whole bunch of cheap plastic-cased tabletop 1/2 size effect units - Companies such as Roland got in there with their BOSS 'mini-rack' series which appeared in two releases... the early grey plastic mini-rack series and the later 'posher' black metal cased series around the early 90's... Accesit were there already with their popular mini series, and others like rebis & Studiomaster had rack slot-in case type racks reminiscent of the famous rack set makes like Neve etc... Then to seal this type of series Alesis brought out their well known 'Micro' series including the famous groundbreaking Microverb 1 & 2... yup.. there certainly was a ton of cheap fx to get your paws on.
Akai entered the fray around 1988 with their mini-series of FX units... and this is the EX-80E enhancer.
I've never used one and have no idea where the 'enhancer' chip comes from inside it... The unit features a 1.5 - 5khz tune-able hi-pass filter @ 12dB/octave slope to tune in the harmonics 'boost' to add 'enhancer' effect to the original sound and therefore the unit features also a MIX control to blend in the amount of enhancer added - There is also a nifty In/OUT switch to compare what you are doing, very important with enhancers to stop you going overboard with the effect and ruining things... Most enhancers use filtering and boosting to add harmonic distortion to upper frequencies and listening to files of this unit in action,it seems to do just that ... These Akai series mini-units run off 12v DC wall warts as far as I remember....
Well, it aint gonna set your world on fire mebbe compared to the more esoteric units on sale nowadays, but remember these can be had VERY cheap in the free-ad's... :-).. they are so cheap, if you see one it might add some interesting sounds to your setup if you run synths or especialy drumloops etc etc thru it... The Akai EX-80E - anyone used one?... user comments please!...
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