The Epic Hardware Megathread

[White_Noise]

Waldorf is especially bad because I think their US distribution is really minimal, there’s like no protection from currency fluctuation and such either. Until this year, it was often cheaper to buy from Thomann and pay import duties yourself on stuff like that, and not a little bit either, several hundred dollars. That tells me that they didn’t build US distribution into their pricing and therefore we as US customers were paying a premium for any units. Most companies will set a reasonable street price in various places that isn’t exactly the same (ask UK folks how they felt about paying the same # of pounds for a playstation even though 1 pount is 1.2 dollars for the last 20 years). But the price is close enough everywhere that the company makes extra in some places and subsidizes lower margins elsewhere. That system is only going to work when you have a fair amount of units moving. Maybe Waldorff just doesn’t move enough units in the States and wants to be more competitive in the EU. I think EU folks have been shafted by Sequential and Moog at various times in exchange.

I quit watches as a hobby. Tariffs just got passed at 40% on all swiss watch imports. So the $1k+ watches all just went up $400 minimum. Cheap chinese watches have been hit even harder, several hundred percent in some cases. So watches that were like $100 are $250-300 now.

I think German/Japanese watches are ok, but for how long? IDK why but it is apparently strategically imperative that the US can manufacture it’s own watches.

[morphic]

Shame I don’t have an older synth to desecrate!

The Glizzy Pack

They fucking glow in the dark!!

[wayne]

@Auto-meh-geddon

Just popping in to say this thread looks awfully quiet.

Whoa! admin and thread necro double whammy!
sup @Auto-meh-geddon

keep dreamin, wayne

[morphic]

Holy Fuck that is expensive.

What happened to @Koldunya ? She used to live in this tread.

[wayne]

she probably found a better forum

[morphic]

If I remember correctly, she was a forum mod herself.

[White_Noise]

You want to have a real hardware talk? I made a resolution to buy nothing this year, after selling over half my stuff last year. It’s had no impact on my music productivity (which is to say I’m not making much these days), but the rest of my life is so much better. I work out twice a day instead of watching gear news/reviews looking for my next hit. I go outside, meet people, do stuff that I thought wouldn’t be fun but totally is. I try new food. I have dates.

It hasn’t fixed everything, I still have the occasional mid-life crisis once or twice a week, because of some of the calls I made in the past that I can’t take back. None related to hardware thankfully. Well, maybe how long I held onto it - different story. But, I think if I still had more hardware and was trying to recede into some imaginary sound world, my life wouldn’t be improving like it is. And if my life were improving like it is while I still have all that hardware, I don’t see how I could justify keeping it at this point. Unless I was being paid to make content/music featuring/about synths, I don’t see myself having more than I do now for a good while.

[KvlT]

I think she’s still moderating the Bitwig discord iirc

[ReWIR3D]

What hardware did you sell and keep? Just curious. I have a couple things I haven’t figured out how to integrate into my setup but told myself I’d never sell lol

[ReWIR3D]

I want that fucking Waldorf sooo bad. I’ve had my eye on it for years

[White_Noise]

Over the years, I landed on the big heavy synth as kind of my type. At my peak last summer I had like 80% of this all at once. I think it’s been like an 8 year journey to where I am now.

Prophet Rev 2 - first synth. It went when I got the Moog One to help pay for that, and because the two had a fair amount of overlap in how I was using them and I enjoy the UI of the One much more.

Matrixbrute - Good mono synth, it just turns out I don’t love monosynths that much. Took up a lot of space and the knobs were a gooey mess that I fixed, before realizing I’d have to take the thing apart to fix the matching gooey buttons. Between that it being the hardest one to tune, it went when I did my big clear out.

Microfreak - fun keyboard since I taught myself music on a qwerty keyboard, so I didn’t mind the lack of travel/feedback. Again just turned out I’m not really a small/monosynth guy.

Akai force - amazing brain of a setup, but whenever I was using it I knew I could just do the same things faster and easier in my DAW

UDO Super 6 - this is the oldest thing I have. I traded my KB for a module last year to pay for textbooks for school, but otherwise no complaints. I like the roland sound, and this does that kind of thing pretty well, and has plenty of it’s own tricks.

Matriarch - I wanted a polyphonic Moog really bad, and also to experiment with modular. I loved this synth for the sound, but I found myself leaving it patched the same way for months on end when I got a good sound, or just using the standard routings. I didn’t have time to learn it like I hoped, and when I got busy with school that became even more true. Part of the culling of 2024.

Moog One - this thing is my baby. It doesn’t do everything, nor does it do all it does well, and I get for the price that is a turnoff for a lot of people. But I cannot emphasize enough that in a room with other modern synth royalty, this is the one I walked in and turned on 90% of the time. It would be the last thing to go if I were to ever fully liquidate.

OB-6 - got this a few months after the One, had always wanted to try the SEM filter. It’s a great synth, but sitting next to a Super 6 and a One, I just couldn’t get used to how much stuff I couldn’t do on this one. Fast forward 18 months and it was part of the culling of 2024 because I was using it so little the buttons/switches weren’t working reliably. Like, I had to go out of my way to sit there and press all the buttons to work off oxidation that was building up or smth. That only happens to synths that are either in storage or neglected, and I realized that the OB-6 just wasn’t for me.

Osmose - I still have this one, though if I were to downsize it would be next to go. I was one of the original backers. It’s a fun MPE keyboard with some killer sounds, and I really enjoy layering it with other stuff, just not by itself as much.

Twisted Electrons MegaFM - I still have this one. Don’t really know how to program it, on the list of things to learn. I have a few patches I managed to fumble together, and it also makes a fantastic dirty layer to complement the cleaner sounds of the Super 6 or Osmose.

And last, Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave (module) - sold earlier this year after owning for 10-ish months. I thought I wanted more of the early grungy digital sound, but this one didn’t really deliver in the way that I was looking for compared to the Mega FM. It can do that and like 1700 other things, but there was so much there I wasn’t using I always felt guilty. And again, still to this day 90% of my synth time is on the Moog One, so having another synth that expensive sitting around staring me in the face that I know I couldn’t get the most out of, just wasn’t working for me. Killing blow was then they added samples to it and I wanted to try that. I did. Once. Never again. I went back to using softsynths for my sampled sounds, and software is really a better interface for that IMO.

There’s absolutely other things I’d like to try. I almost convinced myself to sell the Osmose and get a Polybrute 12 to celebrate finishing my Masters. I’ve never had a straight drum machine, curious what that might be like if I got something like a Tempest/Analog Rytm/TR8-S.

But, I also know that stuff will still be out there when I’m less busy and can dedicate more time/energy to music again. Right now, I go weeks between even booting my DAW or synths, and nothing productive is getting done. That’s not a gear problem, it’s a me problem. I enjoy what I have and know that it’s not holding me back creatively. I just have other priorities right now, and thankfully I feel I can justify holding onto my favorite pieces.

[morphic]

@ReWIR3D

I want that fucking Waldorf sooo bad. I’ve had my eye on it for years

I have barely touched it (as I feared I would when I bought it). It’s practically new. Problems with latency kind of stopped me when I was keen on using it with the DAW. I still need to figure that one out.

As @White_Noise said very well, it’s a me problem, and I know at some point I will give that synth the time it deserves. Amongst other things, I’ve just been more into VSTs and going back to guitar playing the last few years.

[Psychotronic]

I put my new modular together.

New Sampler, Quick Session

[White_Noise]

If there was anything that was going to get me off the sidelines, the Roland TR-1000 would be it…

It’s like the TR-8S except it does anal… ogue.

[wayne]

@White_Noise

Prophet Rev 2

yas queen

[White_Noise]

I actually do miss it occasionally.

I probably wouldn’t buy another one at the prices they are now with the other synths I have, but I have thought about getting one of the behringer pro 800s a few times.

[wayne]

I wouldn’t spend that much on it, would get a different polyphonic honestly. now that my buddy no longer works for Sequential since the downhill slide from boutique to consumer level output since Fuckusrite is trying to follow in the footsteps of Music-Tribe***

I’ll always love sequential, the rev2 is fine even with “only” 2 osc and the layout is almost identical to the pro3 minus the slide bar, sequencer16, and the big filter knob, speaking strictly on the workflow aspect. next time i go down to my buddy’s i’m going to ask to borrow his desktop rev2 and i’ll just slave it to the pro3. if I do that, first thing i’m checking is if the pro3’s patch morphing feature can translate to polyphonic.

Summary

*****cheap knockoffs, less reliable hardware, simulating legendary vintage machines, worried more about quarterly sales and using an OG company name to sell watered down gear, essentially the synth version of disney reboots, but yeah so it goes…****

[White_Noise]

Ehh, I think there’s two sides to their “decline”. Yeah, their top products are all straight vintage re-issues that I’m not personally super interested in. I’ve had and bounced off of an OB-6 already, so I’m positive an OB-8 would not be a good synth for me. Would be marginally more interested in a P10 if I had more money than I knew what to do with - not a problem I currently have but I suppose anything’s possible.

At the other end, stuff like the TEO-5 and FOURM, it’s not really for me either (I like my synths BIG, and I accept that about myself). But, I can see why they’re doing what they’re doing and what the appeal is. I think between inflation/tariffs the last half decade, their older stuff has gotten WAY more expensive than it used to be, worse than any other manufacturer I can think of off the top of my head that still sells something they made 10 years ago. Rev2 is a great example - I got a 16 voice KB used for $1500, sold it for about the same after a few years, and new ones were $2k at the time. Now, I think that’s a $3k instrument, an increase of 50% for what was supposed to be the bread and butter prophet. That’s just not accessible to enough people anymore, I remember $1500 being a stretch for my first synth, so if that thing was double then I would not have bought a DSI (and it was still DSI back then).

So, the new stuff is more cheaply made for sure, but it brings this stuff down to a much more accessible price point. Again, I’m not saying these are the instruments I’d be interested in, but I can see WHY they are doing it. And, bonus, they have much better mod matrices on the TEO5 etc than the Ob-6/Pro-6, which addresses my biggest pain point with their more expensive synths.

The Sequential that I want to try the most that I haven’t is actually a Pro-2. I remember really liking the filter for bass sounds on the Rev2, so a machine with a similar filter and more amenities for mono sounds… sounds like a killer combo to me. But, see above, I know myself well enough to know that I won’t fall in love with a mono synth for more than a few years.

[wayne]

Yeah apologies for only responding to one of the hundred things you said that i would like to have the time to respond to but all i got for now is: i also had an OB-6 for awhile and could not get into it.

[ReWIR3D]

Other than a couple more pedals, I think the only thing I’m really eying for now is the ‘Moog - Subsequent 37’. I think I’m pretty happy with my gear for now. I mean, I do want it all but…

I want to be excited for the ‘Roland TR-1000’ but something just isn’t hitting my feels with it yet.

I really want the ‘Erica Synths - Echolocator’ pedal though or the ‘Meris - LVX modular delay pedal’