A while back I bid on an Alesis ADAT on eBay.

I don’t know why I bid on it, really. As soon as I did I hoped that I would be out-bid. I instantly felt guilty about committing to spending money on some outdated piece of audio equipment from the 90’s that appears to be universally hated by those who were forced to work with it at the time as some necessary piece of transitional technology.

All of the people I’d listened to sigh and groan on those Tape-Op interviews at the mention of the Alesis ADAT echoed in my head as soon as I bid.

Bit who cares. I bid like $50. No way that’s going to win, someone will out-bid me and I’ll be off the hook.

Nope. I got the notification. I’d bought the damn thing for $18. Seriously.

So I didn’t feel that bad for winning the auction.

When I got the package I could hear something rolling around inside of the unit as I unwrapped it. I opened it up to see what was going on inside and it took me a little time to shake out this little guy:

Where the hell does that guy go?

I could hear something clunking around, but it took me a while to find out what it was. This seems important:

It was tough to find, hiding out down there, you cna barely see it peeking out:

Anyways, after playing “spot-the-difference” with photos of the guts of Alesis ADAT XT’s I was able to find online, I discovered how to put it all back together:

Now the thing works flawlessly.

I’ve got it hooked up into my Mackie 1604 VLZ Pro mixer so that the four busses go into the ADAT 1/5, 2/6, 3/7, 4/8 ins, so I can put any channel 1-8 from the mixer into any channel on the ADAT. I have the eight outs from the ADAT going into the Mackie’s channels 9-16, which I can then use the L/R bus to make a stereo mix.

I was also able to score an Alesis “LRC” to which I can use to control the ADAT.

I haven’t given this a bunch of use yet. It all works and I’ve used it to record a few things, but I intend to use it mainly to bounce to from tape. I have a few songs that I want to record with the Fostex A4 I recently bought, seeing how much bouncing I can do before it starts to sound like garbage. I mean, it’s going to sound like garbage no matter what, but you know what I mean.

The first four channels of the Mackie are patched into my patch-bay, so it’s easy to run my 4-tracks into the ADAT.