Kara,
The reasons for me labeling the Fusion as a disaster are this;
An alarming number of people had horrendous problems & what was really disturbing to me,is that Alesis offered virtually no product support for Fusion users & whatever issues that were tended to-in alot of cases,remained unsolved,because the defects were beyond repair....Alesis also had difficulty even trouble-shooting the problems & in some instances,denied that some of the problems even existed!
Alot of people were badly burned by Alesis,because some of them spent thousands for the Fusion & were left with nothing but a pile of defective junk,only after having it a few weeks or months...but also in some cases,some people have had their Fusions crap out after the warranty expired...no reimbursement.
The amount of problems are too many for me to remember right now,from what I've read in the past,but here are a few...bad power supplies,failing display screens,hard drive crashes & freezing..storage problems with irretrievable data..& so on...
Some people are fortunate to have Fusions still operational & some people did not pay full price...but there is always the dark cloud looming over existing Fusion owners,wondering how long their Fusion will hold up.
Also,when the Fusion was first launched,it retailed for close to $3,000...I can't imagine spending that kind of money for a "workstation" that did not have pattern sequencing!
For that price,the acoustic samples were terribly disappointing..so the only thing the Fusion hd going for it,was it's multiple synth engines.
The company as a whole,went downhill since Numark bought out Alesis...and since then,the company has been drastically cutting corners with thier manufacturing & aside from the engineering dept. of the company,most ever other employee are inexperienced & unknowledgable about thier products-particularly the so-called "tech support" people.
It was a frichen miracle that I ended up buying the Alesis Ion,but for some reason,it's one of Alesis's gems...but then again...sometimes when I turn my Alesis Ion on,I get no sound from it and then I have to turn it off & switch it back on again & the sound will be present.
This has been going on very several months,so I worry about what might seriously go wrong with it down the road.
-Thom