bsmart - 29 August 2010 09:27 AM

Fairlight and New England Digital didn’t understand what was going on. They were new companies with a first block buster product, and had not been around long enough to even have time to think about a long view. They were revolutionary machines when they came out, and I think they all got too stuck on always wanting to be revolutionary.

A year or so later, the Korg M1 came out. MIDI your Korg M1 to a sampler, and you had your sequencer/sampler workstation, for $395,000 less than the Synclavier, as long as you could live with only 44Khz sampling.

Actually, you can argue that Fairlight and New England Digital made some far-reaching technical decisions that didn’t serve them well in the long run. Their brute force approach with complex, high-spec, custom-made and costly add-on boards resulted in very expensive instruments which offered no principal advantages over similar gear that was like 40 times cheaper. And of course from today’s perspective, both these expensive “computer music” systems and early samplers look like a toy as they had far less features that are available on computer based DAW/sequencer software and current sample based systhesizers with multi-gigabyte sample storage (the first samplers were like 64 to 128 kilobytes, about 50000 times as less as you can put in the Motif XF).

A great number of my favourite hit records were made with Fairlight CMI and Synclavier systems, and equally great records were made with digital instuments like DX7, Emulator, M1, as well as vintage analog synts. I don’t really want to involve statistics, but the there were far more good records made with the cheaper intruments than with expensive high-end gear (though sometimes the same artists used both of these in different periods of their career). And even greatest number of records was made with cheap analog gear which initially was reduced to a trash bin status, like Roland TR-series.

It shows that you don’t really need the latest, highest-spec, most expensive and most feature-rich musical instrument to create good music. When all these people were able to succesfully work around the many limitation of these early instruments and make big hits, all the moaning about the limitation of current gear is just pathetic.

kday - 29 August 2010 11:27 AM

I remember when Akai used to make a gigantic S1100 sampling keyboard which was cool but they abandon the sampling keyboard market for MPC beatbox samplers until they tried to add sampling in the Fusion synth they came out with a few years ago.

http://www.vintagesynth.com/akai/s1000.php

The Fusion HD was not an AKAI board, it’s from Alesis.

kday - 12 August 2010 11:29 AM

I already know the deal with Yamaha. They’re deliver everything they set out to deliver in advance for this new XF concept and very little else. That’s until you buy their next step after this in keyboard technology. Even if they make a new revolutionary keyboard with synth expansions, etc. You still will be left with something that you wish they could have included and considered very very important to you, that they left off that is considered highly wanted or needed.

Then you may buy the next keyboard with that feature with something else missing from the last keyboard design. It’s all. marketing.

I agree you will never get everything great marketing technique they keep u com in back!,,,,,,,,

DmitryKo - 29 August 2010 05:56 PM

kday - 29 August 2010 11:27 AM

I remember when Akai used to make a gigantic S1100 sampling keyboard which was cool but they abandon the sampling keyboard market for MPC beatbox samplers until they tried to add sampling in the Fusion synth they came out with a few years ago.

Huh! Didn’t know AKAI Pro ever made a keyboard; that should be S1000KB.

http://www.vintagesynth.com/akai/s1000.php

The Fusion HD was not an AKAI board, it’s from Alesis.

Alesis and Akai have merged into the same company, when I was working with the company on the OS development on the Fusion synth and the MPC samplers we were working for both companies having products with interchangeable parts.

kday - 30 August 2010 05:47 AM

Alesis and Akai have merged into the same company

HUH… double shocker! The Numark-Alesis deal was well publicized at the time, but I don’t recall any substantial media coverage for AKAI Pro buyout…

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3624059/Akai-Professional-Jack-O-Donnell.html

So was the Fusion HD actually a Japanese design based on AKAI products, or it was mostly engineered in the US from the scratch?

DmitryKo - 30 August 2010 06:00 AM

So was the Fusion HD actually a Japanese design based on AKAI products, or it was mostly engineered in the US from the scratch?

Fusion was a brilliant American design but used some Akai parts.

As all synth computer parts nowadays come from japan I think.

You’ll also note that the Akai Miniak is pretty much the Alesis Micron.