Alesis Photon X25

Author's product rating:   

Usability	Good
Durability	Very durable
Best suited for	Intermediate
Value for money	Excellent

Advantages:	Ease of use, many interchangeable settings
Disadvantages:	AXYZ dome

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Well the Alesis photon X25, is your standard 25 key midi interface, with a few more adjustable settings than most.

Looks:
With its sleek design, Led lights, an the AXYZ dome. This thing can be beautriful, but mainly by your own opinion. Im sure many would say it is quite some what ugly with the Organge LED's. But as with most things, these LED's are in actualy fact functional.

Ease of Installation:
After plugging in, all you have to do is dunk the CD into your drive, and follow the instuctions. If you wish to install Cubase LE, an included product with this, then your installation will be a little more complicated, but not a lot.

Feel:
The keys feel comfortable, however, at times they do not pick up the sound if you play very softly, but generally all is well. The sound changing knobs are well spread out, and the different sounds can be added with the use of the 10 sound buttons.

configuring:
With the small inbuilt screen, it is quite simple to configure things to how you want, however, this is only made simple after a few reads of the manual. Which is all worth it. It is simple to navigate your way around.

ports:
On the back you will find a:
USB out, Midi In, Midi out, Sustain pedal, Expression Pedal, audio in ( Left and right, seperate ports), audio out ( left and right, seperate ports, and a headphone out, all are your standard guitar lead sockets.

AXYZ:
at first, it just looks like a thing from out of space, however, when using in a program such as cubase, it is good for experimental music: but apart from that, I see no real use for it. As most of these settings can be changed by the Knobs.

All in all, a great midi interface for its price of around £50.