Yamaha REX50
A budget half-rack box that packed ninety effects into a few hundred dollars and made digital multi-effects accessible to home studios.
Overview
The REX50 arrived while Yamaha was flooding the market with digital processors, and it was the cheapest way into that lineup. Mix (September 1987, p.74) reported 30 preprogrammed effects and 60 user-memory locations for custom effects. The presets covered reverb, gated reverb, echo, delay, flanging, pitch change, pan, digital distortion, and combined distortion programs. That's a lot of ground for one box. Each effect allowed up to nine editable parameters, and a utility function let users name their custom sounds.
The pitch to buyers was plain arithmetic. Yamaha's advertising, quoted in DB-Magazine (May 1988, p.7), framed the REX50 as ninety digital effects for "about $5.85 per effect." Recording-Engineer (April 1988, p.31) carried the same campaign with a $525 figure attached. Mix (September 1987, p.74) cited a suggested retail of $495. The exact street price depended on when and where you bought, but the message stayed the same: this was the budget entry point, not the flagship.
According to contemporary trade coverage, Yamaha's own launch materials called the REX50 a "budget digital reverb with distortion programs" and listed it alongside the REV5 and SPX90II in its digital processor lineup. That undersells it a little, since the preset list runs well beyond reverb and distortion. It does explain the positioning. The REX50 sat below the SPX90 series and the REV reverbs in Yamaha's hierarchy, and it was priced accordingly.
Studio Sound noted the REX50's 16-bit processing with 12 kHz bandwidth. That bandwidth figure is worth pausing on. Twelve kilohertz is narrow — it won't capture the air and sparkle of a full-range reverb tail, and it's a clear indicator of where this unit sat in the food chain. The REV5, announced at the same time, ran at 44.1 kHz sampling for 20 kHz bandwidth. The REX50's converters and processing were cut down to hit the price, and the spec sheet says so plainly. For guitar tones, drum machine processing, and lo-fi character work, that limitation is part of the charm. For critical reverb on a vocal, it's a real constraint.
Control was flexible for the money. Programs could be selected via MIDI, an optional footswitch, or the front panel, and Mix (September 1987, p.74) confirmed MIDI program selection from a keyboard or controller. That made the REX50 useful in a MIDI rig where a guitarist or keyboardist wanted patch changes synced to a sequence. The 60 user slots meant you could build a library of tweaked sounds and recall them instantly, which wasn't a given at this price point.
The REX50 was the affordable multi-effects box in Yamaha's late-1980s processor family, for players and project studios who wanted digital processing without spending SPX90 or REV5 money. It traded bandwidth and headroom for price and versatility.
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