5 ms·

Nice, but I guess it's pretty expensive.

by Rochus 3mo ago

Lio 3mo ago
Likely around £11,000 I heard. That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I'll never get to own one or probably even touch one but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use. Luckily cheap software and hardware synths can give us all a taste of what they're like. This Korg seems more like something for museums or professional studios.
- Rochus 3mo ago
  > but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use The irony is that a professional musician in most cases has less budget to buy those expensive things than someone working e.g. as a teacher or clerc.
  - Lio 3mo ago
    Very true especially in this day and age. I think by “professional” I mean someone already successful rather than an up and comer.
    - Rochus 3mo ago
      Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.
      - Lio 3mo ago
        In someways this isn’t that unlike the past. I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London. That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time. Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
        Lio 3mo ago
        FYI the current run of Korg PS-3300 sold out in minutes even at £11,000.
        Rochus 3mo ago
        Unbelievable. I guess because of a lot of bored software people rather than trained musicians.
        blt 3mo ago
        Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices. The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
        steve1977 3mo ago
        > entirely new capabilities are unlocked But unfortunately, it will primarily be used by rich YouTube "creators" to recreate some old Jean-Michel Jarre tracks.
        Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
        I want to say I agree, but since this is 50 year old tech, wouldn't there be newer mass produced products that do the same thing at a fraction of the price? Even if purely analog it would benefit from economies of scale, miniaturization, etc.
        blt 3mo ago
        I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge: Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips. There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply. But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity. So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
  - brudgers 3mo ago
    Musicians who landed a successful sync licensing deal, have that kind of money. Likewise producers who got points on something that took off. Anyway, $11,000 for a musical instrument is not that much for a musical instrument even when it is a lot of hamburgers for a given musician.
    - hexo 3mo ago
      what is "sync licensing deal"?
      - gizajob 3mo ago
        Music you made which is now used for adverts or tv or films
        brudgers 3mo ago
        Or video games.
- Mistletoe 3mo ago
  > If the hardware price tag (over $17,000) is out of reach, Cherry Audio offers an exacting virtual analog emulation for just $49. :)
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  > £11,000 > That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.
  - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
    It must be understood that, unlike grand pianos, the building containing an installed pipe organ is integral to its operation and sound, so their costs, construction and maintenance are inextricably linked for the lifetime of the instrument.
    - defrost 3mo ago
      For the computing connection, Knuth reportedly built his house around his organ.
    - alwa 3mo ago
      Unless, of course, Cameron Carpenter is involved: https://archive.is/DQQq0 https://archive.is/DQQq0 https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8 https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8 …though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace… > “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.” > The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system. > Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable. > “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.
      - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
        No, no no. I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments. It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator. You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether. Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room. A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening. So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.
- wavemode 3mo ago
  £11,000 is a lot of money, but in the context of instruments is pretty reasonable.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
    The original 1977 price was around £5800, which according to the BoE inflation calculator is £35,000 in modern money. These are an unusual design, because they're an organ/synth hybrid. There's a tuneable oscillator for each pitch class, but they're divided down for the octaves. So it's more like a string synth/organ architecture than three full synth voices per key (which would be insanely expensive), but the dividers for each octave are driven by single VCOs which can be tuned manually and modulated together. The sound is... interesting. Analog, but doesn't have the legendary reputation of other synths. Korg always made quirky little synths, and this is more of a quirky big synth. They didn't make many of the original. The reissue is aimed at the usual Gen X/Boomer demographic who would have wanted one when they first appeared, couldn't afford one, but have the cash to burn now.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
  Yeah, you can enter the market of (physical) synthesizers for around £100, or for free via the myriad of online/digital ones. Things like this aren't for making music (anymore), but for collecting.

Nice, but I guess it's pretty expensive.

by Rochus 3mo ago

Nice, but I guess it's pretty expensive.

Lio 3mo ago

Likely around £11,000 I heard. That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I'll never get to own one or probably even touch one but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use. Luckily cheap software and hardware synths can give us all a taste of what they're like. This Korg seems more like something for museums or professional studios.

Rochus 3mo ago
> but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use The irony is that a professional musician in most cases has less budget to buy those expensive things than someone working e.g. as a teacher or clerc.
- Lio 3mo ago
  Very true especially in this day and age. I think by “professional” I mean someone already successful rather than an up and comer.
  - Rochus 3mo ago
    Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.
    - Lio 3mo ago
      In someways this isn’t that unlike the past. I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London. That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time. Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
      - Lio 3mo ago
        FYI the current run of Korg PS-3300 sold out in minutes even at £11,000.
        Rochus 3mo ago
        Unbelievable. I guess because of a lot of bored software people rather than trained musicians.
        blt 3mo ago
        Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices. The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
        steve1977 3mo ago
        > entirely new capabilities are unlocked But unfortunately, it will primarily be used by rich YouTube "creators" to recreate some old Jean-Michel Jarre tracks.
        Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
        I want to say I agree, but since this is 50 year old tech, wouldn't there be newer mass produced products that do the same thing at a fraction of the price? Even if purely analog it would benefit from economies of scale, miniaturization, etc.
        blt 3mo ago
        I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge: Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips. There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply. But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity. So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
- brudgers 3mo ago
  Musicians who landed a successful sync licensing deal, have that kind of money. Likewise producers who got points on something that took off. Anyway, $11,000 for a musical instrument is not that much for a musical instrument even when it is a lot of hamburgers for a given musician.
  - hexo 3mo ago
    what is "sync licensing deal"?
    - gizajob 3mo ago
      Music you made which is now used for adverts or tv or films
      - brudgers 3mo ago
        Or video games.
Mistletoe 3mo ago
> If the hardware price tag (over $17,000) is out of reach, Cherry Audio offers an exacting virtual analog emulation for just $49. :)
ssl-3 3mo ago
> £11,000 > That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
  It must be understood that, unlike grand pianos, the building containing an installed pipe organ is integral to its operation and sound, so their costs, construction and maintenance are inextricably linked for the lifetime of the instrument.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    For the computing connection, Knuth reportedly built his house around his organ.
  - alwa 3mo ago
    Unless, of course, Cameron Carpenter is involved: https://archive.is/DQQq0 https://archive.is/DQQq0 https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8 https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8 …though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace… > “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.” > The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system. > Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable. > “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.
    - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
      No, no no. I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments. It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator. You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether. Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room. A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening. So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.
wavemode 3mo ago
£11,000 is a lot of money, but in the context of instruments is pretty reasonable.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  The original 1977 price was around £5800, which according to the BoE inflation calculator is £35,000 in modern money. These are an unusual design, because they're an organ/synth hybrid. There's a tuneable oscillator for each pitch class, but they're divided down for the octaves. So it's more like a string synth/organ architecture than three full synth voices per key (which would be insanely expensive), but the dividers for each octave are driven by single VCOs which can be tuned manually and modulated together. The sound is... interesting. Analog, but doesn't have the legendary reputation of other synths. Korg always made quirky little synths, and this is more of a quirky big synth. They didn't make many of the original. The reissue is aimed at the usual Gen X/Boomer demographic who would have wanted one when they first appeared, couldn't afford one, but have the cash to burn now.
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
Yeah, you can enter the market of (physical) synthesizers for around £100, or for free via the myriad of online/digital ones. Things like this aren't for making music (anymore), but for collecting.