The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

From: "Timo Sandholm" <timo.sandholm@...>

> Which leads me to another question. Why AN1x disappeared from market so
rapidly after it was released, was there maybe some lawsuit thing going on?
Were Yamaha forced to drop that product line maybe because of some copyright
or something like that issues?

I would imagine that Yamaha made some calculations in the sales department.
They predicted they would sell N units, so they produced N units and that's
it. That's most probably why the AN1r was canned: they thought they wouldn't
sell enough units to make a profit.

Which leads me to believe that it disappeared from the market that soon
*because* it was a success.

Yamaha is good at producing a lot of units at one go, and I mean a serious
amount of units. It also means that if product X is being produced, product
Y cannot be produced. So they can't go on producing a certain product for
several years, like a smaller manufacturer with a far smaller product
palette like Access or Novation can.

But the AN1x was the first of kinds kind in Yamaha's product line, a bit of
a test case, and I think it has served to produce the later AN units, like
the AN200, PLG150AN, and in a way the EX5/5R. (The latter one, in turn,
seems like a test case for the Motif.)

If Yamaha doesn't think the virtual analogue market is saturated, and that
they can sell enough units, we will see new AN synths. What is kind of
worrying is that there hasn't been any evolution in the AN structure, apart
from cross-modulation. We don't have more oscillators or filters, for
instance. It could have to do with the economic crisis that has hit Japan
hard, and from which it is still trying to recover.

I"m not the Yamaha expert, but this is what I can tell for hearsay and some
reasoning of my own.

- Peter