[A6] A6 & SX

[Mike Peake]

At 10:24 PM -0500 11/6/02, David Evans wrote:
>  > By the way, what does A6 mean? Is it Alesis's 6th synth? Thanks.
>>
>
>   There's info about this in the Sound on Sound A6 review and, I think, in
>the list archives.  Briefly, Alesis keyboards usually get names with some
>letters and a number, the number indicating whether there are 61, 76, or 88
>keys.  Since the A6 is analogue it made sense to call it the A6.  I'll
>leave the rest of the story to somebody who can tell it with a straight
>face.

The sidebar in SOS regarding the battle between
the engineers and the marketing department was
told to SOS by...the marketing department. That
is why it has a "spin" to it. We did NOT want it
to be called A6 specifically because we thought
that it was funny, owing to the fact that the
custom chips are ASICs (Application Specific
Integrated Circuits). It's _humorous_, but not
the reason we had wanted that name. David Bryce,
now of ADAM Audio USA, was the keyboard marketing
director at the time and wanted it to be called
Andromeda. We wanted it to be "A6" for many
reasons, including integrity with the keyboard
line naming scheme, exactly as David describes it
(Analogue, 61 notes). We also were unable to find
a good name for the machine. We tried, we tried
again, and then again. Nothing stuck. We examined
both sides of the coin, to name something with a
word or to simply use characters and numbers. There
were good arguments for and against each. It was
decided to keep both names to make everyone happy.

I have since come to know that Andromeda is indeed
the best possible name for the synth, have apologized
to David, and we are brothers now. Hell, he got the
second pair of ADAM monitors in the States, and I
got the third not too far behind him :-)

All the better to hear your A6 with,
-- 
Mike Peake, Your Psychic Friend

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