this is occam’s razor, searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. or to paraphrase, the simplest explanation is often the truth.
it’s also a big risk and akai has flopped hard making bad decisions in regards to this ever since they had that big restructuring a few years back. trying products and falling on their face. elektron has been very business savvy and I know they didn’t release the syntakt to match digitakt and digitone on accident. but you definitely have some good points.
Electronics in general has reached a great point where the functionality of a previous product remains after the new product is released. Cameras are a great example.
Manufacturers are no longer able to show exponential hardware development cycle on cycle. PC graphics cards or gamming consoles are other good examples.
Faster and bigger is often always better but we are reaching the end of the horsepower wars for electronics. Manufacturers will have to start differentiating their products by UI, features, usability and beta testing.
Speed and size will still be important just not the single reason for purchase like a early 90’s PC.
I have owned a new MPC One and it’s tough for me to imagine it’s better than the updated DT. I guess it matters what you want. The Elektron excels with it’s sequencer, modulation, envelopes,LFOs timing, OB functionality and build quality.
The MPC one has a bunch of plugins and can autosample and autochop. All features that don’t matter much to me personally. The thing about the OT and DT is they are well built, solid machines that seem to be nice and reliable. I love that in a piece of hardware, especially since I have a MIJ MPC 2000XL that works like a charm still to this day.
Not trying to bash the new MPCs but my point is that I am not sure Elektron is too worried about their updates. I suspect Elektron’s next release will not be a sampler either. If you look at it, you can the DT, DN and Syntakt and essentially have a 20+ track full production studio if you want to.
I suspect that is elektron’s vision here, not 100% sure but it makes sense.
Now what will they release next? That is the question.
One thing that I think that there’s room for in Elektron’s line up and probably in the market generally is an interesting polyphonic sampler. One with some more modulation possibilities than the Digitakt. Things like key tracking and mod envelopes or even using one sample to modulate another. Give it the same form factor as the Digitone. I think it would be a winner.
I think this is the truth. Elektron may release something closer to an all round groove box next, something to replace the analog rytm platform but with a new name and a synth engine built in.
I’m honestly surprised that so many new companies find startup capital to even develop let alone produce some of the products that come to market in the audio/synth/music industry. I mean, I know we buy products, but there must be so many kickstarter campaigns for this stuff because without crowd funding I don’t think a lot of it would ever happen.
Yeah I think modular is the great crossover there. It provides a “modular” relative low/cost effective format for entry level innovation to the market space.
you do see a lot of modular companies that are unknown but come up with popular modules, I don’t think modular is easy to develop but it becomes easier to market when no packaging is expected of your venture.
If the only prices available are asking prices, what do you expect will happen when someone wants to buy one? Commerce will not stop because the price increased.
This is what’s left. If people are hungry, they will pay to eat.
Yeah but take reverb for example. Reverb is full of listings for used products above the cheapest new prices available. Many listed used prices are people just fishing for offers and a poor fool that doesn’t know any better.
these are reverb sold prices for last month, there are some people paying the maximums for used product. the first number is just the number in the list so I wouldn’t lose track.
1 650
2 625
3 620.50
4 599
5 600
6 704.99
7 599
8 590
9 600
10 570
11 690
12 600
13 649
14 635
15 654.42
16 700
17 675
18 598
19 654.50
20 550
21 550
22 640
23 600
24 595
26 570
27 610
28 650
29 625
30 600
31 590
32 600
33 625
34 575
35 650
36 575
37 610
38 600
39 575
40 600
41 550
the picture should be much clearer a month from now if I look at march sales sold prices.
Definitely. One way I often see the DT is as a multi-timbral synth that use samples as the sound source instead of oscillators. To see something that takes that perspective even further would be amazing:
polyphony, stereo, full modulation w/matrix, etc. But keeping samples as the sound source.
I could see it…