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-85P Parametric eq unit... Yummy.. a cheap parametric, and if you know parametric's then you know how incredibly useful they are in the studio allowing you to get loads of sounds & effects not possible with any other unit!!...
The EX-85P features a lo and hi shelving eq at either end... highly useful to trim out unwanted frequencies from the signal prior to getting stuck-in with two main parametric eq's which occupy low and midrange tuneable bands which crossover-
Akai have arranged the unit's front panel layout quite cleverly... You get a LOW paramtric band and a HI parametric band each with frequency & gain pots - then at the end of the unit after the Hi-Shelving eq pot there is a Dual pot with two controls stacked in one labelled 'Band-width', which sets the 'Q' for either of the two parametric's... cool setup, and there is also a nice IN/OUT switch to compare the treated signal with the original... nice!!...
Well, these Akai units run of a 9V or 12V Dc wall wart as far as I know... This EX-85P unit is a great find in the free-ad's... Parametric's this cheap are hard to find so if you see one, check it out...
The Akai EX-85P - user comments please !!....
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