Wiardgroup

Goodness!
Harry seems to have set a ball to rolling here…
Re: Kbd Mags as the `Unobtanium Review'…. Brilliant! It is certainly
true that i no longer risk sticking the pages together in my lust for
that which i shall never have, luridly depicted in the synthporn media. 
(chuckle… i found all those synths, broken and abandoned by their
former owners on my front porch 15 years later, with a signs taped to
them "Free, if want this old crap, Doc"!) 
Anyway…i always tell the joke that when i was 15 i could carry 10
times as much gear as i could afford now the ratio is inverted! Could
it be that the fact my salad days are behind me and i could actually
go buy ** a mega-Triton or a Neuron neutralizes their appeal? Thus ,
the `Unobtanium Review ` has lost its savor because i, the former kid
at the candy store window can now afford the tariff to go inside…..no
more Unobtanium???

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…methinks there's more to it than that.

It appears to me (unwashed outsider that i am) that the corporate
factories have realized that there's less gold in the hills of
unobtanium than in the swamps of cut and paste software `production'.

2 observations about the commercial synths nowadays:

Like the whole rest of the business world, the corporate synth
factories are thoroughly committed to the Wal-Mart business model.
When your customer base is desperate to own STUFF and lots of it ,
drain the quality (read: cost) content down to the barest minimum so
that you can drop the price to a level where lots of them will try to
buy on in every color. Mind you i'm recognizing that this is a VERY
effective model for making money and that's what the surviving synth
companies DO. There are , of course, always a tiny percentage of
exceptions but by and large, they're all Roland now.

There's a Microsoft model at work out there too. When you create and
release model "B" . Cut and paste as much of model "A" as possible and
stick it under the hood but completely overhaul the outside. Sell
barely distinguished versions of the same thing over and over as much
as possible. Check under the hood of those appalling softsynths behind
the holographic replicas of Moog modulars or 2600's on the screen. How
many sawtooth routines do you think they paid to develop? 

i used to envy the folks at the mags. The freshly minted proto's would
roll-in for review; stuff that no one outside the factory had seen
before. Now…  i can just see them hogging their web bandwidth on
thesaurus.com looking for adjectives that they haven't had to use in
the last 6 issues, to describe the gadgets in an endless parade of
nearly identical offerings.
It's easy for us  readers to lose interest , ho hum, and wander off to
the analog tent where , at least, the anodized aluminum is aluminum
and not a chimera of pixels….but those poor writers and editors HAVE
to write SOMETHING about this homogenous wad of microcode ….or they
get fired!

Becker and Fagen are in my headphones; "Hey Nineteen!". 
 I'm just too old , scarred, and jaded to attend to the hype anymore.
 And so…the mags aren't writing for me anymore. No surprise there! 
To be fair there's lots of marvelous stuff too , mostly recording
gear, sci-fi-level capability, in my spare-bedroom studio compared
with what i even dreamed possible , much less affordable, when i was
saving up for my first 2600.

But as for synths…
I remember what i wanted in 1970 & in 1980 and how badly i wanted it.
Now it's here! The old Chinese curse proved true. What proved most
dangerous to me was getting what i wished for. Remember that… all you
20-yr olds drooling over autotune, arturia and autocorrection plug-ins.

-doc
 

**(not without a significant degree of perhaps imprudent sacrifice…
but still POSSIBLE)