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Bionic Beat Boy (pojb01@wumpus.its.uow.edu.au)
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The AVM APex is a good option for those wanting a card-based sampler. If you are after great ready-made sounds go elsewhere, to a Yamaha card perhaps. The preset sounds are average (I'm a hard marker!). The Kurzweil MA-1 synth chip onboard provides some interesting possibilities for synthesis. The card is upgradeable to 64 meg of RAM in 72 pin SIMMs. Software and manual support is very poor with the patch editor not yet complete (there is a beta version but you can't really use it for anything except fooling around with yet). The multimode filters are controllable from any assignable MIDI controler which is a big plus and the filters don't sound too bad. It is probably too expensive. If you simply want a sampler without too much fuss, go for an AWE64 Gold or something that is cheap. The Apex does have a seperate direct synth out with -98 to 100 dB SNR. There is only two FX processors with only stock standard FX (as yet I don't think delay time etc is programmable - I hope I am proved wrong!) Overall, quite professional sampling utility I guess (when patch editor comes out - you can use Everest alterative editor, but it costs US$45 which is about $80-90 in AUD at the moment...bloody falling exchange rate!) Many sound sculpting options but looks quite complex to use (bring back the old days of Vienna SF and my AWE32!) I almost forgot - this card consumes more resources than.....well, something that consumes a lot of resources. It takes 3 IRQs, something like 5 address ports and two DMA channels. WHich is pretty crappy if you use multiple cards or aother utilities (like myself!). It is Soundblaster PRo compatible (hardware) so, yes, you can use it to play Doom etc. If you want no hassle great sounds straight away, buy a sound module or Yamaha sound card, but if you want a good sampler with pretty good sound sculpting options (multimode filter, lots of LFOs, envelopes etc, etc), relatively cheaply, this might be a good option. Have a listen and muck around with it extensively before you buy to make sure it is what you want. In it's price range there are many, many options, so shop around. VERDICT: Worth considering. I am fairly happy with it. I give it 7.5 out of 10.
Comments About the Sounds:
Average. Some good, others quite synthetic. Better than a Soundblaster AWE32 or similar, but can't touch my Roland RAP10 GM SoundCanvas card. The sounds just aren't rich and detailed enough.
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(Thanks to Bionic Beat Boy for this info.)
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Released: 96 -97? | 
