Alesis Fusion Synth Workstations Deliver Superior Audio Quality in a Convenient, Portable Solution Based on TI's DSPs

Alesis Fusion Synth Workstations Deliver Superior Audio Quality in a Convenient, Portable Solution Based on TI's DSPs

Powerful, Professional Music Production Center is One-Stop Shop for Creating Musical Masterpieces at a Lower Price

HOUSTON, April 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing a commitment to providing product innovation that drives the professional audio, musical instruments and recording markets, Alesis and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE:TXN) today announced the availability of the new high-performing Fusion Synth Workstation at a much lower price point. Powered by three floating-point digital signal processors (DSP) from TI's TMS320C67x(TM) DSP generation, Alesis' new Fusion Synth Workstation for professional and prosumer musicians demonstrates its powerful and flexible architecture by giving the user more than 200 voices of polyphony and by incorporating multiple types of synthesis capabilities. For more information, visit http://www.fusionsynth.com/.

Designed for the modern keyboard player, Fusion is a powerhouse product containing four types of synthesis, a multi-track hard disk recorder, built-in sampler and a large library of built-in effects processing. The Fusion Synth Workstation can be expanded with an optional RAM card and CD burner. Artists can record, edit and manipulate sounds just like on a computer, as well as store samples on the 40-gigabyte hard disk, for the first time at a sub-$3000 price point. Alesis chose TI's C67x(TM) DSP floating point technology because it is able to perform the demanding audio applications that require high precision, flexibility and raw performance.

"Alesis is enthusiastic about the use of TI technology in our Fusion Workstations. In the past high-power, high-value synthesizers have been based on expensive custom ASIC solutions, but with TI's C67x(TM) DSP generation we are able to create a world-class workstation that has tremendous performance and flexibility all for an incredibly low price," said Alan Meyer, director of engineering, Alesis. "The Fusion Synthesizer Workstation is the next step in Synthesizer Workstation technology, and it would not be available to the performance driven keyboard player, without the pricing and performance of the TI C67x(TM) DSP generation."

Available in two models, a 61 note semi-weighted 6HD and an 88-note fully- weighted 8HD, the Fusion Workstations come complete with a sequencer and sampler.

"Alesis' decision to use TI's C67x(TM) floating point DSPs is another example of TI's ability to deliver superior audio-optimized products," said Gerard Andrews, DSP audio solutions marketing manager, TI. "In addition to the raw processing power of the C6713 DSP, TI's efficient C-compiler and DSP/BIOS(TM) kernel ensure that customers, like Alesis, are able to reliably meet their desired market window by reducing the optimization and debug tasks required for product development."

The C67x(TM) DSP continues to gain momentum in the musical instruments market as it provides high-speed encoding, multi-channel broadcast encoding, digital mixing and high-quality effects processing. Additionally, the C67x(TM) DSP has been chosen as the foundation for biometrics, machine vision and instrumentation applications.

Pricing and Availability

Priced at $2999 / $2699 (Fusion 8HD / Fusion 6HD), the Fusion Workstations will be available by summer, and may be purchased at most music instrument retailers. For more information about the C6713 DSP see http://www.ti.com/c6713pr. The TMS320C6713BGDP225 DSP is available in 10 Ku quantities at $24.50.

About Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' real-world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductors, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.

Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.ti.com/.

About Alesis

Alesis manufactures a full line of professional audio and musical instrument products capitalizing on its strengths in digital, analog, semiconductor, and transducer technologies. Alesis products include keyboards, synthesizers, hard disk recorders, USB controllers, Firewire I/O devices, electronic drums, mixers, signal processors, effects units, amplifiers, and speakers. Alesis delivers revolutionary product solutions to the music and audio production industries. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.alesis.com/.

Trademarks

TMS320C67x(TM), C67x(TM) and DSP/BIOS(TM) are trademarks of Texas Instruments. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20010105/NEF016LOGO AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org/ PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com Source: Texas Instruments Incorporated

CONTACT: Lisa Ferrara of Texas Instruments, +1-281-274-4213, lferrara@ti.com; or Tara Strong, +1-713-513-9561, tstrong@golinharris.com, for Texas Instruments

Web site: http://www.ti.com/ http://www.alesis.com/

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