The market must have room for companies that focus on efficiency and cost-cutting to make established designs affordable, but that can’t be the whole market. The day no company can charge a significant premium for their products is the day investment in innovation dies.

It should be immediately obvious which of the two describes Moog, whose new product is the focus of this thread. Sure, there are adjacent issues and lulls in news to fill with idle chatter, but I find it baffling that anyone would participate in a thread with zero interest in the product the thread exists to discuss.

Even though it may seem like it from a capitalistic point of view, money is not the only force driving innovation. In fact, it’s probably not even the strongest.

Not sure if this was about me, but I am certainly interested in this product. I am still waiting to hear something from it that would make me wish I had $8000 to throw at Moog though.

It's not the mechanical reliability, but software. Less man power less programming, more beta.

That thing is also ugly as f'n hell, lol.

I just trust larger companies to have the R&D to be able to create highly complex machines.

Memory Moog is what broke Moog's back with it's complexity...

It definitely did in some parts of the world.
It was retailing here for NZD$7000 on release which is around USD$4500

Money doesn’t cause innovation, but many forms of innovation tend to require money. So there’s correlation rather than causation.

Profit margin, which has an obvious relationship with pricing. An organization with slim profit margins doesn’t usually have the luxury of taking risks and reinvesting significantly in R&D. There are exceptions involving outside capitalization and success at scale, but neither tend to be major factors in this industry at the moment.

If you don't like it..... don't buy it! If you don't like the way it looks... don't buy it! No reason for you to be in this thread.

Mass-market vs. "high end": increasingly, these days, maybe for a while now, the difference in physical parts quality is almost zilch. It's not like the days of old where you're paying for hand-matched transistors, top-end small-quantity Burr-Brown DACs, etc. etc. The _physical_ difference between synths in terms of quality and reliability is not a factor.

What you get, when you pay $8,000, or $4,000 for that matter, or $3000, is a level of R&D investment in custom design, and perhaps even more importantly than that, and the innovation that comes with it, is "after-sales support." The latter means stocking inventory to make sure what's sold has the parts needed for future repairs, if needed; that the expertise is there for repair and tuning and the like; that the company that has sold the instrument is as committed to it for the long haul as you are.

Beyond all that, it's more a question of variety and depth of capability than absolute sonic difference per se. Less expensive synths are narrower and more targeted in focus in terms of what they can do, are more likely to be "throwaway" (no further support after 3-5 years after sale), may have a look or feel that says "less expensive" in current terms (plastic rather than wood or leather, cheaper plastic rather than better plastic, etc.). They may re-use a common bin of parts rather than have more specific parts sourcing for their production and support. They may have a smaller support team and less training in support and customer service post-sale. All that stuff.

Anyways, to me, they all sound great! Priced high, or low, of whatever seeming quality.

But, just as I wouldn't knock a high-priced item for its price, neither, these days, would I knock something more mass-market in price. The results are basically astonishingly good, either way.

Do you think people get on the Ferrari forum and complain about the prices?

Yes. I'm a little concerned about the software as well. But a bug free OS is not what I would buy a River for. It would be for its sound, and its sound, and, most importantly, its sound.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I also hear it's only skin deep. And given a little more time, I'm sure I could come up with a few more clichés to hammer the point.

I hear you! Going boutique is not without risk.

It's also true, in the case of The River, that its creator will release all of the code and plans to the public if he ever can't afford to carry on the product line.

Someone will no doubt pick up and maintain the code if it comes to that, if I have to do it myself. Fortunately, I've been in software and IT for 20+ years by now.

So I'm not particularly concerned. It's a synth, FFS, how difficult can the code be... I've already worked on things with a gazillion lines of code and multiple platforms.

Yeah it’s crazy how the andromeda people are having to reverse engineer the OS because Alesia never released it. Just crazy.

I find most retro-inspired gear a little aesthetically challenged, but it really is the sound and ability to inspire that matters most. Of course it also dictates where I can keep a given piece of gear without ruffling too many feathers. The guitars and piano can occupy places of honor in our primary living spaces because they’re wonderful pieces of art in their own right, but everything else winds up banished to the studio.

These complex synths do worry me. Often when troubleshooting/repairing vintage there is no component fault but some dirt/dust/debris on the circuit board causing an issue.

That is much less likely to occur with this new construction (maybe impossible) but I do not like the idea of shipping a synth across the globe or expensive tech fees to solve such trivial issues.

Yet another project I want to tackle at some point is doing a commented disassembly of the firmware for classic synths (probably starting with OB-X or Prophet-5). I've done this a bunch before for basic microcontroller products usually written in assembly language, esp. arcades and Atari 2600 games (which are brutal). I guess there is potential for doing things with the code when it's done, but I am mostly curious how the whole thing works.

PS - Where is a 'nerd alert' emoji when you need one?

OK, back to talking about the Moog One – I can’t believe we didn’t get anybnew demos this week. I will try to see that as a positive though, as Moog is most certainly extremely busy this week in making sure that they roll them out the factory on time next week.

The vocoder isn’t that important to me as I have a SVC-350 that love and use all the time. I think that vocoders are under appreciated tools, they do way more than just robot voices. One of my favorite things is to get a nice string pad then modulate it with a high hat pattern. It’s like buttah I tell ya, buttah!

Any word if there are going to be any more demos from Moog or Sweetwater?

Markets can and do stifle innovation. Products have to be marketable first, and innovative marketing is usually a more effective way to accomplish that than an innovative product. I feel like the folks at Moog are some of the last people approaching synth design as an art unto itself, that they put their creativity and passion into, much like musicians making music.

$8000 is too much for a synth for me, but all the people who preordered are proof that it's reasonable for what you get: more synth than the $6k-ish Studio Electronics poly units, with a top quality keyboard.

It's not really an issue. It's like a lot of people who have amassed a decent vintage collection, new Moog things seem overpriced and uninteresting.

But for everybody else without a special Jupiter 8 it is still appealing.

I like new Moog stuff. I like the artists that feature in their videos and play at Moogfest. It seems a bit of a waste of energy to actively dislike something, I usually just ignore what I don't like.

But I like pppch, misunderstood a little here. Anyone driving a mazda filled with vintage synths is cool in my book.

I will never deal with Awave.

Fortunately the Moog One is available from Manny's, now part of the Store DJ group.

The One looks and sounds amazing now the real question is can Behringer clone this call it:
The B-one and sell it for $599. Heck I would even go to $899

Perhaps.

The repeated tendency here, though, is the assertion that because the individual parts aren’t expensive, the resulting product shouldn’t be expensive. It’s completely devaluing the design process, the commitment to a relatively small specialty market, and the value of supporting a company that employs the kind of talent required to dream up something new rather than simply regurgitate the past.

Evidently the only meaning of “premium” that has any meaning in his world is “consists of expensive things.” I find this troubling in a musical context, because in a streaming world music consists of ... nothing, really. Ephemera. And yet we all seem to feel it is something inherently valuable to be perused. Reconciling those two viewpoints takes either a heroic act of willful ignorance, or a total lack of self-awareness.

People often pay a premium for something they feel they can’t get elsewhere, or something they feel is a cause worth supporting. I certainly think that way, and a list of pre-orders on this thread say I’m not alone in that view.

good additions!

Tell me about it. Or 5-octave keyboards!

I think both mini-keys and 4-octave polysynths are an indication that synths are played differently now than in the past--in other words, less.

For those who started out with 5-octave keyboards or who migrated to synths from piano, these types of keyboards can be frustrating to play.

The usual knee-jerk reaction from some musicians is, of course, to say not everyone plays prog rock and wears a cape--which could be funny, I suppose, were it not kind of pathetic.

To me, it's a sign that musicians today care less about keyboard technique than they once did (on a keyboard instrument no less). This sentiment ends up with manufacturers giving us less capable instruments.

Yes. Even if I can't afford them, it's nice to know instruments like the Moog One are out there.

Maybe more than half the people who buy these synths are not trained keyboardists. I have no keyboard skills.
Think of them more like 19” midi modules.
Most people, in studio or live, have a main midi controller.
Selling synths with limited keyboards brings the price down to affordable.

Of course. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not a trained percussionist. So, I'm grateful for what drum machines can do for me.

But musicians who are keyboardists want instruments that allow them to make the most of the technique they've spent years developing.

So, the release of a new analog poly with 5 octaves is something I celebrate.

Sure I agree.
I don't agree that most synths should have performance characteristics. Most people use a master controller, and adding full size keyboards, ribbon sliders and mod wheels just makes those synths a lot more expensive.

Ten years ago my studio had a tiny walkway between several humungous full size synths. Now I have as much power in a handful of desktop units.

For sure. I wouldn't be able to have as many synths as I do were it not for keyboard-less rack units and desktop synths.

As for the tiny walkways... my studio still looks like that. I have to say, though, I enjoy navigating them.

The arrangement of instruments has been carefully planned. I even consulted a feng shui expert!

Quick tip to increase Moog One sales substantially: Send a unit to the guys who did the demos for the Baloran River.

I had this exact thought early tonight. Sweetwater’s deep dive was very useful to understand features, but he is using the init patch most of the time. The Baloran demos are just plain good music. The moog demos are a mix of poorly designed patches with soulless cliche playing. After listening to a bunch of Baloran demos last night I feel that 50-70% of what we are hearing from the Baloran can be done on the One, it’s just that no one has actually had the time to do it. And I suspect coming from a European musical influence is a good portion of the difference. On top of that there are definitely sounds on the One that would inspire if done by the Baloran demo makers that the Baloran can’t do. It’s just a matter of time before inspired demos of the One comes out. It’s too powerful to escape some great demos and sounds. The raw osc sounds from sweetwaters deep dive actually sound pretty good to me.