Not for nothing, but midi controllers and synthesizers are not toasters. The niche market changes the landscape when discussing these clones of contemporary gear.
It’s important to remember that behringer isn’t selling this for cheaper or offering anything new for the end user, so I don’t think any “competition helps the consumer” arguments hold water here.
Again, to me it’s less about this specific clone, than what it means for the landscape in general. Keep in mind they sue journalists and even just random forum users for defamation. When you bully and intimedate critics and sue them, that’s a big red flag.
I predict that this thread might need to go away as uncomfortable as that makes me.
I’m not going to defend Behringer’s disastrous PR or its litigious attacks on critics.
I don’t see any serious difference between a sequencer and any other bit of consumer electronics. I don’t know whether it can be described as a niche product, or even what that would mean, if anything, in terms of ethics.
Is the fact that it’s opening at the same price point as the competition supposed to rule out the benefits of competition? I don’t see that. There will be differentiators, it’s inevitable. There are even people who argue the merits of different brands of cola, which is basically heavily sweetened carbonated water sold in a variety of packaging. In this case I imagine Behringer’s play will emerge as some kind of enhanced software compatibility. It’s a well trodden path, as Mackie would be happy to affirm.
Or someone making a piano that resembles another piano. I was at Steinway once in New York and they told me that in the early 19 hundreds there used to be about a 100 companies in New York alone building pianos, that probably all looked quite similar, and had the same amount of keys and all builders would try to get them to sound good and …
It sounds like a cheap shot, but someone has to be second to market. Somebody has to be the second engineer to spot a successful way of solving a problem in somebody else’s work and copying it. Quite often “successful” doesn’t necessarily mean “embodying better engineering principles” or even “most economical.” With consumer products in particular, user inertia is huge. This is why patent law exists, to make sure the innovators who are successful don’t wall away their trade secrets forever. They’re encouraged to publish and for that they get a few years in which they have total control over use of their invention. After that it’s in the public domain, forever (there are nuances, particularly with inventions of military or strategic use, but that’s the basic idea.) But for most of us plebs, we’re just invested in the notion that turning on a washing machine or a computer shouldn’t be a daily adventure. We want things to work in ways we’re familiar with, from last time we turned on a device of this sort. This means that after a time the most successful ways of doing things tend to reach commodity status, and the patent system is there to discourage companies from keeping their best practices secret. In the end, everybody can build a 24db ladder filter.
With the IBM PC the most successful lawful clone merchant was one of the earliest. That was Compaq, which eventually grew big enough to gobble up Digital, and eventually was gobbled up in its turn by Hewlett-Packard. When you bought a Compaq in the early eighties it was so you could have something that would run Lotus 123 and DBase and umpteen other business productivity applications that standardised on what came to be known as MS-DOS. Even MS-DOS was a clone, originally a copy of the venerable 8-bit OS CP/M for the 16-bit Intel 8086, which also ran well on the 8088 processor used in the original IBM PC. When you bought a Compaq in the late nineties it was because you could afford to pay a premium for the best on the market. IBM, at least the Big Blue that existed in 1983, had vanished from the consumer PC market by that time.
I don’t disagree with your principals, its just that they have no shame at all about it, and combining their recent behavior really icks me out.
That said, I don’t blame anyone for buying or using their products, and wont tolerate anyone shitting on someone for buying / using this gear. At the end of the day its just gear, and getting wound up about it isnt healthy.
All’s I’m saying is I’ve got my eyes on them, and this was my line.
Finally I had time and energy enough, just about, to turn on the Neutron again. That thing sounds gorgeous.
As usual I can’t find the MIDI cable needed to link up my Rock Band keyboard, and I’m reluctant to start a wild goose chase in the hope of getting a workable USB setup using the laptop, so again I end up using the keypad on the Crave.
It was, in the end, a music therapy session. My creative juices didn’t flow. The Arduino and the shift registers I assembled for my large scale rotary control experiment glower at me. I’d forgotten that the Arduino’s boot loader needs to be reprogrammed before I start running sketches again. I know how to do this in principle, but still lack the energy to hunt for the programmer or build one on a breadboard. I suppose I should just get one of the Mega2560s out as I’m pretty sure we didn’t wipe the bootloader on those.
Yay, finally found a DIN MIDI cable and connected it to the Neutron this afternoon while dashing around doing other things. Got to bed at around 2200 and pulled out the Rock Band 3 keyboard and connected it to the other end of the MIDI. Of course I had completely forgotten how to work the keyboard controls, but I could press keys and work the modulation and pitch bend features. Very late and I was exhausted anyway. I’m really impressed by the sounds that come out of this thing, though.
As I was browsing the Arturia website it struck me that all the sofware they released in the last couple of years, which I think precedes their hardware releases, are all ‘copies’ / emulations of famous synth hardware. So what is it they are complaining about?
And it seems that more and more people are proceeding along this route. Have a look at this video of a well know youtuber who is releasing his own line of synth modules soon, which as he says (while signing the module), and I quote: “I like to hand finish all my modules you know, I think it is an important element, it lends an air of eccentricity to it, and also the knowledge that the person who is going to receive it is going to be getting something that is absolutely original.”
It’s a weird culture. We don’t have to buy into it to use the products. We should be aware that the production methods are somewhat exploitive. It’s funny that we have this first world problem of worrying about whether some products of which we are passive consumers may be copies of other products. Of course they are, and if we don’t find a problem with “own brand” baked beans I don’t see why we should complain about own brand keysteps or own brand telephones.
I particularly like that he seemingly is speaking to someone interviewing him and is meanwhile clearing out a patch on the module in order to have sufficient room to be able to sign it. Brilliant!
Hello ;
I don’t know if this is really where it has to go but I didn’t really want to create a new discussion for this…
Anyway…
I’ve just seen this discussion and I watched the video of @Jos
I had no idea that Behringer had released a series of modules based on those of the ARP2500 and when I looked for them I was really surprised that they were so inexpensive! Indeed, they are all under $100. I would like to buy one like the double envelope generator(1003) but I wanted to get your opinion on these modules. Are they interesting?
You can find plenty of reviews on the latest modules on youtube showing how they work and how they sound. Most reviews are very positive and the value for money often is unsurpassed.
Yes it’s sure that with the price of this adsr (55$) it’s worth it! And it’s always nice to have a reproduction of one of the modules of this legendary synth. Even if the quality is surely not as good as at the time…
OK, you’re probably right! (which really makes me want to buy them!) I said that because at the time the modules must have been worth a fortune and still are today for the originals.
Right, I’d definitely rather have the originals, but not because of their quality. The 2500 was supposedly a real pain to keep in tune for one thing and the build quality of the Behringer modules is quite good. I don’t have any of the 2500 series yet, but the Moog and Roland clones are really quite good, if not exactly imaginative.
