Virus C battles the Alesis Andromeda A6

[anykeystudio]

Hi, this is my first impression and comparison between the two beasts. I has bean written quite a lot in this subject and off course this is my personal opinion.

I started off only playing the Andy for one week to get some decent sounds. The factory presets are terrible, even worse than the Virus factor presets. I wasn?t that impressed the first days, but saw the potentials in the synth. The fourth day, the Wooow factor of the Andy swept me of my feat.

After a week with the A6 it was time to test it against my Virus C. Woow again, the Virus sound good to. No wonder I have spent 2 year of tweaking it and I had an arsenal of favorite sounds.
The pads in the C are not as ?airy? as the A6 ones. In the A6 I could get instant OB8 pads and JP8-6 pads (I had the JP6 for many years). It?s not as easy to get this type of sounds out off the Virus. Especially in the high region on the keyboard. Where the analog sound was focused and sweet compared to the digital one.

Time to test the Saw bass. Set both machines to single saw and no filter, no mod, no env. etc. Here it was harder to hear the differences. So I made recorded a bass melody in my MPC2000XL. So I could compare between the two sounds by muting on and off. The A6 is punchier and have more treble/top and fells a bit more alive. When applying filter its hard to make comparison, because the analog filter behave different from the digital one. But when I used the Moog filter in the Virus, the sound got more muddier and lost some brilliance.

Conclusion; the analog A6 are more like a Swiss army knife, it have more bottom/top-end. It?s more alive and you can get very got acid lines that the Virus can match.
But if you?re not a sound addict and can live without the last 10% to get the perfect sound. The Virus is the perfect deal. But if you realy need the analog sound, well?then the Andromeda is the bitch for you.

Greeting Glenn.

P.S Someone want to buy a Virus C desktop model by the way ?