REPORT: There were so many great products at this year’s NAMM show that we just didn’t get to cover everything in January’s article. Here are more neat and nifty noisemakers to consider for your music manipulation needs.

Allen & Heath
While they were announcing an extension to the iLive digital mixer line, it’s the line itself I’d like to mention. In impressively compact and lightweight units, iLive offers you on-board signal and FX processing with a gate, parametric EQ, compressor, limiter/de-esser and delay on each of the 64 input channels. All 32 mix outputs have a 1/3 octave graphic EQ, parametric EQ, compressor, limiter and delay. In addition, you can store complete set-ups in the console by saving to a USB key for quick and easy recall. You can get into more detail on their site.
www.allen-heath.com

IK Multimedia Total Studio 2
The IK products seem ultra-cool. Of course, they may be merely excellent and it’s their personalized NAMM demos that make people really like their gear. Still, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the aptly-named Total Studio 2 for composing, tracking, mixing and mastering. Consider the fun of adding 14,000 multi-sampled instruments to your studio with one purchase. This includes 5 virtual instruments and workstations; 7 effects plug-in suites covering guitar, bass, mixing and mastering; and more than 160 modeled effects in one all-inclusive package. Lots of info and many more products are on their site.
www.ikmultimedia.com

Muse Research Receptor 2
Spend enough time in studios and you hear people wish for a piece of gear that could run “hundreds” of virtual instruments and effects. And then they add, “with minimal latency.” And then they add “with maximum polyphony.” Sound too good to be true? Introducing the Receptor 2 Pro and the Receptor 2 Pro Max. From what I’ve seen, both are well worth checking out, and the Pro Max model offers a monster-size 1 TB (1000GB) SATA 2 hard drive with a 3GHz dual-core processor. There’s a product demo video on their site.
www.museresearch.com

Tascam DR-100 Portable Recorder
It’s tough, it’s tiny, and it’s terrific. There are four built-in microphones (two cardioid and two omnidirectional), analog limiting and filtering, a pair of XLR microphone inputs with phantom power, and line in/out connectors. The DR-100 comes with a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery and also runs on AA batteries or an optional AC adapter. Built-in speaker, metal enclosure, tripod mount, and wireless remote control complete the package.
www.tascam.com

Spectrasonics Omnisphere Synthesizer
The latest release of this highly-regarded synth adds more than 2000 new patches created by sound designers around the globe, including Diego Stocco, Scott Frankfurt, Ignacio Longo, John Lehmkuhl, Tobias Marberger, Stephane Bonvallet, Hans Jorg Scheffler, Tolga Gurpinar and Eric Persing. The update (Omnisphere 1.0.3) is free to all registered users as a download from the Spectrasonics website.
www.spectrasonics.net

Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56
Overheard at their booth: “You get a Firewire interface with 8 mic preamps, and two of the mic pre’s use the next generation of the Liquid technology. What’s that give you? A choice of 10 different pre-amp emulations based on the Neve 1073, the Pultec MB-1, the Telefunken V72, and others.” And it keeps going because you also get 10 analog outputs, 16 channels of ADAT i/o, stereo S/PDIF or AES i/o (on RCA phono), MIDI i/o, 2 virtual ‘loopback’ inputs, for routing digital audio between software applications, and BNC wordclock i/o.
www.focusrite.com

Source Audio Hands-free Guitar Effects
Guitarists, imagine operating your guitar effects pedals with just a wave of your hand. The Hot Hand system uses motion sensors to translate movement and position into control signals on their sleek-looking and great-sounding wah and phaser/flanger pedals. See their video demo online.
www.sourceaudio.net

Pioneer SVM-1000 A/V Mixer
DJs, VJs, and clubs looking for a reference audio and video combination mixer have to come to the SVM-1000` because there may be no competition for this gear so far. The features are outstanding, including an 11-inch LCD touch-panel display, symmetric channel layout, 4-channel audio and video inputs, 96kHz/24-bit digital sampling, 32-bit digital signal processor, and a 600MHz/32-bit/4800MIPS analog-to-digital converter.
www.pioneerprodj.com

Dave Smith Mopho
In past NAMM shows, I’ve found the Dave Smith products difficult to play with but I got a demo on the Mopho and it looks like a great product that will be tons of fun. Plus, ya gotta love that product name! The all-new Mopho monophonic analog synthesizer provides some sonic twists on the Prophet ’08, such as two sub-octave generators and an audio input to process external audio and mix Mopho’s own audio output. It also has a manual trigger that lets you play a specific note or play short melodic lines without a keyboard. Fully programmable and tweakable, the Mopho can also be used with a MIDI controller or external sequencer. A free editor to facilitate programming is available for Mac OS and Windows. Try the video demo on their site.
www.davesmithinstruments.com

[tags]NAMM, Allen and Heath, iLive, IK Multimedia, Total Studio 2[/tags]