Equipment Review
Product Reviewed:
Alesis SR16 Drum Machine
Made by: Alesis
Cost: $240 USD
Submitted by Bolts
Rating: 
Features:
16-bit stereo sounds, including sounds with reverb and ambience added. 100 preset and 100 user patterns. 50 preset and 50 user drum kits. Velocity-sensitive dynamic articulation. 16-voice polyphony. MIDI IN and OUT/THRU. Mono or stereo outputs. "100 song internal memory" (yeah sure)
Technical Specifications:
What I liked:
This is a great all-purpose low price drum machine. Many useful sounds, much of which are quite natural-sounding (except crash cymbals) and quite easy to fool someone with. There is a good amount of control over the parameters for a machine this size. The velocity sensitive keys help quite a bit to maintain natural feel, as does the option to set "swing," allowing beats to fall just slightly after where they're set to fall (offsets the rigidity of the quantization of the beat). Easy to learn with two decent manuals (one a "get started quickly"-type) that covered all my questions. A nice machine to demo songs with.
What I didn't:
Sometimes when two sounds have a similar timbre or fall too closely together, one sound will override the other, causing a perceptible stuttering effect that will destroy the illusion of natural drums. The manual covers this--there are ways to correct it. Also, like most drum machines, some of the cymbal sounds suck, but the hats and rides are pretty nice. The supposedly 100 song internal memory is a bit misleading, unless each song consists of one or two pateerns! But the memory is perfectly fine for all your works in progress and then some. I have about 16 songs in there now, with an average of 7-8 diffent patterns apiece.
User Tips:
Stack sounds, and use (for example) two kick drums and snares for each set to vary timbres. Turn quantization on only to get your beats set and play the rest in real time. These are probably the two best tips toward natural sounding kits. Using an outboard processor, even on sounds that effected with reverb/ambience), can yield some cool results.
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