Wiardgroup

Certainly, Unobtainium still exists in your life, Doc.  It just might
not be here at this modular JC Whitney parts counter we are standing
at....

gary

(FYI, the term Unobtainium was coined from a friend who works for
Skunkworks - it refers to exotic composite materials that we haven't
seen commercially yet...).



--- In wiardgroup@yahoogroups.com, "drmabuce" <drmabuce@...> wrote:
>
> 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)
>