From aristontyler@hotmail.com Mon Nov 19 10:21:35 2001
Subject:Speakeasy Follow-Up

I played a small gig over the weekend and wanted to update my impressions of
the Speakeasy pre-amp.

Since the gig was relatively small, I decided to give the pre another go
using just my on-board leslie sim (XK2) which, as everyone knows, is
horrible. As I mentioned in my first review, I had been using a terrible
amp at home when trying this initially. The amp had terrible frequency
response, as I suspected it would.

With the amp, I had said that the pedal really doesn't improve the onboard
sim all that much. Playing the board and speakeasy through a somewhat decent
monitoring system, however, I stand corrected. The tone was vastly better
with the pre-amp. It even helped smooth out the overemphasized beating
sound of the onboard sim some. It still didn't sound nearly as good as
playing through a motion-sound, of course, but I no longer cringed when I
played it, as I do when I don't use the pedal, in fact (purists cover your
eyes), I actually enjoyed playing and was much more inspired.

If you are a keyboardist who already has to haul around several boards and
doesn't like the idea of carrying around a leslie or motion sound, you NEED
to consider this pre-amp. I cannot imagine what this thing does for the
CX-3, which has the best digital leslie sim to date.

I am in no way affiliated with Speakeasy (I had to shell out the bucks for
the box just like everyone else), and I'm not trying to clutter up the forum
with Speakeasy praise, but this pedal has definitely been worth every penny
to me. To be completely unbiased, I have to admit that I have no idea how
it stacks up to the ART pre-amp that others on the list are talking about.
In fact, I would be interested in hearing other people's impressions of the
ART to see if it produces similar results.

Play hard!

-Ariston

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