Akai Professional has started shipping the HV-10 DecaBuddy, a rack-mount version of their DecaBuddy VST plug-in, a multi-part harmonies for your vocals. By adding 9 harmony parts to the original vocal, up to 10 voice harmonies can be played: 5 parts (Original + 4 transposed Harmonies) x 2 (Voice Doubler). Harmony can be selected using any one of the many Preset Scales, programmable User Scales or via MIDI. In addition to generating harmonies, pitch correction can be applied to the harmony parts and the Formant parameter can change female voices to male and vice versa. For a more natural performance, apply random pitch-shift and/or random delay to each harmony part independently. The DecaBuddy provides 50 banks, with each bank containing 2 Programs. All 100 programs can be edited, stored and/or overwritten in memory.

At the Winter NAMM show, Apogee introduced Big Ben, a 192 kHz Master Word Clock that offers some innovation. For example, using proprietary Apogee technologies, the all digital C777 clock and "Adaptive Loop Filtering", Big Ben is able to intelligently minimize jitter to previously unattainable levels. With other features such as real-time format conversion, fail safe lock to external sources, termination sensing, an optional Firewire card and a wide range of I/O choices including 6 word clock outs, Big Ben is poised to create a new standard for studio digital clocking in the industry.

In France, some dealers announce 40 % and 50 % drop in price of EMU Products. Due to the lack of global Dealer in France, EMU decided to work directly with Music shop. Emu Product should be nearly affordable at a factory price and with a normal warranty.

Following the success of Mini-Me, Apogee is excited to offer the latest addition to their Mini Series, Mini-DAC. This 192kHz D/A converter, is the ultimate portable and compact solution for studio playback, reference monitoring, USB connectivity to your DAW, and premium home audio systems.

All our fellow using bass guitars will be happy to learn that a new technology of MIDI conversion was demonstrated at NAMM as our fellows from NAMModdities pointed out: the Bass2MIDI from Limex. The system is claimed to be four times faster than previous available ones.