I’d buy the Prophet~6 and OB~6 again if they had those knobs
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Yeah, does this lead the way for others to do this too ? LED rings can be used similarly after all.
Or maybe this is just something for Melbourne Instruments alone, and not really very significant otherwise.
Really for me it’s the other parts of this synth, and how it sounds that matters more.
My thoughts as well. If the knobs seem to hold up and aren’t too expensive, this seems like a great addition to flagship synths from the big synth companies. Respect to these folks for taking the first step here, I hope the product is well-received.
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I wonder if its an easy repair if an encoder fails. If its motorized and not electronic they may come up with a fix kit you can do at home. Other companies do this say Polyend with the jog wheel.
What is the point of putting 32 motors when 32 infinite potentiometers and one of the display solutions such as LEDs, a screen or screens are enough, are cheaper, more solid, less heavy, and certainly less polluting.
Motion encoding, morphing… absolutely does not require that.
It looks very much like a false good idea from a distant past where raw materials and energy were thought to be unlimited, like the 60s or something like that.
A small mechanical arm that writes on a mini slate instead of the screen too, right?
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Yeh, I gather from what he said, that there was a haptic feeling to them.
Agree. Would happily settle for LED rings around the pots on any synth.
Hipster?
If thinking before you buy and asking manufacturers for a minimum of global reflection makes me a hipster then maybe… Are you American?
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It’s innovative. You know, like the audience will turn up at gigs with their drone remote control units and mess around with your parameters.
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No lol. Im asking if its a hipster device?
I don’t have a very precise idea of what a hipster is, apart from hair specificities,
we don’t have many here, so I don’t know their needs or if this gas factory synth corresponds to them.
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Motorized bongos ??
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fixed gear?
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Not everyone likes screens to do everything on. Some don’t care about weight and price either. 
I don’t get the pollution part, this will have limited effect on a global scale vs everything else people use on a daily basis. More solid also depends on the quality of the components and if or how things can be repaired.
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The world scale is made of rungs, we are largely at the time when each rung counts, this is a rung.
A synth is already a luxury, filling it with options of this kind is not necessary, even repairable ones.
But that’s not the subject here, I just wanted to point out a detail that ultimately reveals more about the consumer than the manufacturer…
Dave Smith Instruments learned it the hard way with their Prophet '08. The original version had encoders only. People where so unhappy that they changed to potis in the next revision (PE edition) and also offered an upgrade kit to exchange the whole controls PCB with the PE edition.
In my own experience with the P08 and the Hypersynth Xenophone was, that having a synth with encoder only is equally bad as having a synth with just potis while working with presets. You just don’t see what the heck is going on. Of course there are other ways like the Hydrasynth or Elektron devices but they come with their own disadvantages.
Nobody really needs any hardware synth these days to make music. Software and samples are more than enough. (I’m ignoring the “analog fetishists” fraction of users here) It’s all about creating a workflow which boosts peoples creativity.
Beyond a reminder to be respectful of others, here are a couple threads for continuing a discussion that seems headed off-topic here.
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A sound only demo from Sonic State.
This video is a bit patched together, my guess is Jim Heywood had a limited amount of time with this synth – there is probably only one prototype, and a lot of demand at the show.
I hope they can limit the Kickstarter to the 500 part sets they have secured, rather than being overwhelmed by a huge first build. There is a lot of interest in this synth.
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Sooo curious as to the price. I know the line has been less than you’d expect, but considering what I expect it to be, less is still probably a lot more than I hope. No way this comes in under 2k, right?
Probably they will get an australian price tag. So its gonna be prohibitivly unobtainable for the rest of the world…