> inMusic isn't free from controversy. Formed in 2012 by Jack O'Donnell, a former vice-president at DJ equipment brand Stanton
> Roger Linn, who made many ground-breaking drum machines in the '80s before creating the MPC 60 for Akai, has accused O'Donnell of failing to pay him royalties after acquiring Akai, repeatedly calling him unscrupulous and a "bastard" in interviews.
Is it absolutely necessary to fuck people over to get to the top? Would love to get some counterexamples.
"Business is war"... there are very little ethical businessmen out there so you're swimming among sharks and think that it becomes a game of ripping off each others.
I've seen some pretty nasty stuff done in order to maximize profit... I don't want to be negative but there is a reason why these jobs attract a certain... profile... or if you can't "adapt" quickly, you're done.
Of course some small shops still exist when it comes to synths, especially in Europe where one manufacturer can make direct deals with European retailers, that's why the Eurorack module format is a thing. But these aren't "maximizing their profit". It's a scene that has loyal customers that are ready to pay a bit more for ethical purposes.
Does the market tend to find "inefficient" areas and someone comes in and "maximize efficiency"? I think Behringer is trying to catch all revenue in that space...
> Does the market tend to find "inefficient" areas and someone comes in and "maximize efficiency"? I think Behringer is trying to vacuum all revenue in that space...
Yes. Behringer, from the start, was always about copying other brands and offer products to a larger audience through low prices. They used to do so with results of questionable quality... but not anymore. Their output in the synthesizers department has been excellent: low prices, good quality, good sound. They still rip off other brands for 95% of their stuff though... there is absolutely no imagination there. They see what works well in the market, come with a much cheaper version with a different (or not so much) design and it's done. Latest release, a Moog rip-off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LADPPcaN0
At least with Edge and Crave they changed the UI so someone wouldn't necessarily know it's a clone unless they were familiar with both synths.
I kind of wonder if this was an intentional decision for Behringer or if Moog trademarked their interface and thus forced Behringer to do something different?
I don't know... but they didn't change much the UI for many older synths. Maybe some kind of patent expiration at play here ? I'm not into legal matters.
I suppose the interface might be covered by design patents, which are sort of like trademarks. I doubt it would be covered by a utility patent unless there was something really unusual about the interface. At any rate, patents expire after 20 years, and trademarks do not. Copyright could theoretically come into play, but I think the "look and feel" lawsuit pretty much established that it's pretty darned hard to enforce any kind of copyright on a user interface.
Some of the very old synths that Behringer has been cloning were probably protected by utility patents that covered the electrical circuits, but those have long expired, and I think trademarks become unenforceable if your aren't actively selling a product that uses it anymore. I don't have any moral objection to cloning the old synths either -- our laws have mechanisms to grant inventors exclusive use of their ideas for a limited time, but when that expires it's part of the commons. That's a good thing. I do think it's gross though to clone a popular recent synth just because you can and because the original designer didn't file the right paperwork to stop other people from doing that.
There's a continuous flamewar on /r/synthesizers between the people who think Behringer is a detestable parasite and the people who think they're making high-quality analog synthesizers available to the masses in a way that they never have before. I think both camps are right to a degree. I will defend Behringer's right to use the stuff that's clearly in the public domain, but I also think they have no class. They do things that damage their reputation even when it wouldn't have required much effort not to.
(I'm not an IP lawyer, so don't take this as expert commentary.)
> I think both camps are right to a degree. I will defend Behringer's right to use the stuff that's clearly in the public domain, but I also think they have no class.
Right -- same as 7Artisans / TTArtisan lenses. Genuinely impressive, affordable products, combined with a notable and surprising lack of self-respect where external design is concerned. At some level a lens barrel is a lens barrel, and the "big" brands are converging in their design language anyway as is normal, but the sooner these cheaper brands develop a consistent design language, the better.
They changed the step buttons on the RD-8 though as Roland has trademarked this particular color scheme. (It is not written 'colorway', we are not in sneaker territory)
Since Behringer usually keep clones as close to the original as possible, I think this was a strategy to avoid legal issues when cloning something recent. These ones are functionally equivalent, but presented quite differently.
Crave, Edge, and now the just-announced Spice are more or less one-to-one replications of the signal paths and controls of the Mother-32, DFAM, and Subharmonicon respectively.
I’m glad Behringer made them look completely different from the originals, though I’m still not quite sure how I feel about them cloning synths that have been on the market less than a decade (as opposed to their typical cloning of 30+ year-old synths). The compact format and addition of MIDI are meaningful changes, at least, and there is something to be said for making the entire trio accessible for about the price of one of the Moogs.
moog is selling very generic circuits, there's no intellectual property at stake, so rip off is I think is quite an exaggeration. The original moog pioneered the space, in less than two decades lost popularity in the face of newer ideas from competitors, and sold out to a big company that milked the brand name for awhile and also wanted to shut it down. The original founder got the rights back and basically pulled a Harley Davidson, made a nostalgic brand with premium pricing, "made in USA", employee ownership, etc.
There's a huge industry of competing synths, and moog's strategy of sitting on big fat brand margins gave them a cushion to old school, but also kept their nice sounding products out of the hands of young musicians. Young musicians getting started are the quintessential "starving artists". Behringer said "hey, these are generic circuits (not much more complicated than logic gates) and tons of people who can't afford them would like to use them. Modern scaled factory manufacture can bring them to the masses" and as a result they are very popular.
laying out the knobs in similar order? I mean, it's File-Edit-View and Cut-Copy-Paste, and laid out like the 6 strings of a guitar...
moog invented the ladder filter, it was amazing and unique, they patented it and enforced the patent. That was 50 years ago, the patent has expired.
Of course there's variation, but most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.
> most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.
We are basically talking about the user interface, not the underlying synthesis engine/implementation. There is quite a bit of variety among synth interfaces that otherwise follow the standard subtractive synth mechanism of producing sound.
Copying old designs is perfectly fine - designing things is hard, but it's not the only hard thing out there.
For a trivial example, is it a problem if a silverware company is selling spoons, forks and knives that look like all other spoons, forks and knives? With the intellectual property rights gone, many companies create a business around being efficient at production, distribution and marketing, which are not easy things to be good at!
Another example... We don't need a social media crypto cloud document editor, we need great, inexpensive, fast, polished, standard document editors.
Let's end this idea that everybody needs to be always imagining new things. Innovation is obviously good, but excelling at building things that leverage humanity's collective, public-domain intellectual property is also great.
Depends who is doing it and why.
Music gear is sometimes expensive for a reason.
Shall all small synth makers go bankrupt there will be no one for Behringer to copy. Only old and rip-off designs from now on…
Behringer are hit and miss on this. They killed it with their Minimoog clones - very, very close to the real hardware - but not so much with some of their later efforts.
I have their Pro-One and their K2 and both lack the character and warmth of the originals. They sound like clones.
The P800, Solina and Kat all seem very good though.
People who accuse Behringer of cloning are missing the point.
They used to literally copy circuit traces and component BOMs. That's just outright theft. But they don't do that now.
The recent synths are clones in name only. They keep the panel graphics and functions but reimplement updates of the original circuits with SMD parts on new board layouts using a new industrial supply chain.
They have a deliberate policy of building reusable platforms so the development costs can be spread across multiple products.
All of that is innovative, and there's a lot more involved than copying an old circuit.
There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss. But it's not necessarily more psychopathic than (say) Roland's approach, which is to keep reselling versions of the same technology - often with the same samples - over and over at cash-grab prices for a couple of decades.
"differences" is not the same as "poor copies". You can even hear differences between different exemplar of the same analog synth, depending on components selection, calibration, age, etc.
Classic analog synths rarely sounded exactly like other copies of themselves. There was quite a large variation from device to device. I anticipate the Behringer stuff to be more consistent. As far as how close they sound it will depend on the particular example of classic synth you compare it to.
> There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss.
Thats quite some... BS. Gillet intented to exit the audio hardware industry in search of different, greener pastures already way before Brains was released. Also MI code is public, so 'cloning' is a stretch. MI designs were and are being produced by multiple shops.
Behringer attracts more attention. Arturia used MI code in the MicroFreak and falsely claimed they had Gillet's blessing, nobody cared. Arturia make VST clones of every popular synth out and charge $500, nobody cares. Behringer makes an affortable version of the Model D because Moog never bothered to and people complain.
Yes, Gillet has a history announcing ceasing development and production. Just read 'Have we been here before?', and also the last comment.
I bet people already asked Gillet directly if B's announcement contributed. I don't know, a) i don't care about vendor / personality cults, and b) their forums are gone.
My 2600 sounds incredible although I have no idea whether its sounds like the original. I also have their Neutron which is a great original design. I hope they focus more on original designs in the future.
It's incredible how Behringer has gone from making total garbage to making pretty decent stuff. I mean who wouldn't want a Pro-One for 250 bucks? I threw my credit card at the screen soon as I saw it. Then again if I was behind the original Pro-One I'd be outraged.
Peter Van Hoesen has a really good review on YT about one of their Moog clones. He knows his shit and concludes it's overall pretty great.
I wonder who at Behringer was behind this crazy pivot. Can't recall seeing anything like it in any other industry.
The one I heard (and love because it's true) is that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off.
And for the ones still naive to not really understand what I mean: "Costs of labor", "handling fees", and similar line items in an invoice are merely an inverse reflection of how generous the guy billing you feels at that moment.
Is that his essay that talks about how lisp knowledge can save future 9/11 attacks from happening?
That’s a favorite of mine. Written right after the attacks. But I wonder why he delisted it while still hosting the essay to make it hard to find but still accessible
Paul Graham compares the hijacking of an airplane to a buffer overflow attack.
He doesn't claim that tools for writing more secure computer programs could prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane.
He proposes the idea that some similar reasoning can be applied to preventing hijackings. It's not enough to monitor who gets on the airplane carrying what, but to separate the cockpit space from the passenger space.
I know, that’s what I said his essay was about: Lisp knowledge would have prevented 9/11 and can prevent future hijacking attacks. Thanks for providing additional details - it's a treat to re-read his thoughts on 9/11
Likewise, knowledge of effective hijacking prevention techniques could be relevant in defensive program and system organization.
I don't think his point is very good because array overruns in a heap can be exploitable. Lisps (and other kinds of run-times) don't necessarily separate code from data in their heaps.
It's interesting that he feels shame about the article enough to delist it, but still believes he has a useful point enough to leave it up without linking to it
Overtly mean doesn’t work very well, but that’s the stupid form of mean. Covertly Machiavellian seems to work, as does the kind of initially ingratiating gradually controlling personality of a cult leader.
The best kind of mean for todays environment seems to be Machiavellian coated in a superficial gloss of magnanimity via stuff like effective altruism, longtermism, or wokewashing.
This is an odd framing. Causing harm doesn't require malice, in fact most businesses larger than Dunbar's number in employees aren't really driven by affect or emotion at all, but by people all weakly following incentives. The externalities of this behavior is where people get harmed, without ever requiring the intent to do so from anyone within the business.
My thesis is that malicious behavior by executives is in some large percentage of cases not intentional but uncontrolled profit-seeking behavior by the ant-heap that is their organization.
Of course it's not intentional - mostly. But if harm occurs, there should still be legal and personal liability for it.
Otherwise you have the "Just following orders" excuse.
This isn't an academic issue. Corporate harms are pervasive, very real, and hugely destructive to the economy and to the well-being of (at least) hundreds of millions.
Whether or not it's necessary, it's common in the music production business. There are several egregious examples, Gibson Guitar being perhaps the best known.
My opinion of Gibson was permanently formed when they bought Opcode and its brilliant Vision software (tens of thousands of customers) then just made sure that it died.
Gibson took over an audio startup a relative of mine had co-founded. Gibson offered extremely promising terms - funding, keep creative freedom, just deliver cool products.
The startup delivered the products and met the goals -just in time for Gibson to go bankrupt.
Inside Gibson there was endless corporate infighting. - an executive that was championing the acquisition of the startup was fired - the support was basically nonexistant afterwards (no marketing, nothing)
It’s been a pretty open secret that Gibson has been a hot mess internally for quite a while. At one point the CEO said he saw them more as a lifestyle brand than a guitar brand, like how Harley Davidson tries to position itself in motorcycles (I don’t know anything about motorcycles so maybe I’m wrong but that was the comparison going around).
The best thing that Gibson has done recently has been to unify the Epiphone (their budget brand) line up with their lineup, and Epiphone’s quality has been a lot better since then in my experience. Now you can buy a relatively cheap Epiphone, slap some good aftermarket pickups in it, and have a really great Gibson-style guitar for a lot less than a Gibson.
Yup there's another example of what I think of as the "hedge fund" approach. Sweetwater started as a neighborhood music store, now its owned by a hedge fund, guys who may not even like music. Bob Moog and Roger Linn loved music and it showed in their product. But just like these other examples this isn't the end of the Moog sound, especially since they also now own all the moog software synthesis products you can expect moog to land into the akai mpc line.
Watched an interview with the rapper DoseOne the other day, he said he still makes records but doesn't engage with the music industry (promoting, gigs etc) as there is too much bullshit, instead he does work in the games industry and cites that as much more sane.
> has accused O'Donnell of failing to pay him royalties after acquiring Akai, repeatedly calling him unscrupulous and a "bastard" in interviews.
This seems extremely straight forward to sue against? Basically the claim is either never paid for specific sales (very easy to win) or stated number of sales is lower than expected (requires lots of disclosure).
OR, maybe he did win in court and they simply ignored the court order?
Probably because they seem to have the most egregious examples based on works that seem to everyone else to be pretty successful?
"the Tolkien estate sued New Line, claiming that their contract entitled them to 7.5% of the gross receipts of the $6 billion hit.[23] According to New Line's accounts, the trilogy made "horrendous losses" and no profit at all."
I think most people would find it surprising that both Return of the Jedi and the Lord of the Rings movies failed to make a profit?
The situation might seem "extremely straightforward" to you, but it is an expensive and time-consuming kind of legal dispute, because it requires discovery of years of business records, expert witnesses in forensic accounting, and likely a trial to establish whose interpretation of key contract terms is the controlling one. That means years and at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work, at the end of which a trial is hardly a sure outcome. Unless the plaintiff is willing to commit to funding that out of pocket, then he'd have to find a lawyer willing to take it on contingency, meaning he'd pay as much as half of any award at trial, after legal costs were deducted. Unlikely the best-case outcome is much, and the worst-case outcome could bankrupt an individual.
"maybe he did win in court and they simply ignored the court order" No, that doesn't happen in countries with solid legal systems, if it's a corporate defendant with easily identifiable assets.
Have a really good lawyer who anticipates this sort of dispute. I would bet that the contract was written in a kind of "tricky" way that didn't make it clear exactly when the royalties applied.
I think the artist (unless they're like Radiohead or Taylor Swift or something) is always going to be at a massive disadvantage in any negotiation with a label (massive corporation).
This is just the nature of capitalism. The more capital you have, the more leverage you have.
The people who actually create the product are always at a disadvantage compared to those who own the means of that production.
You can try pooling resources together to negotiate collectively (unions), but without government intervention to put a thumb on the scale to try to even the playing field for unions vs corporations, even that would usually end poorly for the people who produce the actual product (see: union busting, the Pinkertons, etc.). Historically, they may actually even straight up just kill you for trying.
Capital also equals political power (even moreso since Citizens United), and corporations use that power to do everything they can to prevent that balance from tipping any direction but theirs.
It's just business, unfortunately. You can engineer a solid contract, but then the side with the leverage will look at it and say no. And that side is probably not yours; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be selling your business.
> then he'd have to find a lawyer willing to take it on contingency, meaning he'd pay as much as half of any award at trial, after legal costs were deducted
right, so "extremely straight forward". You seem to think that "giving up a lot of money" somehow invalidates it being "straight forward".
Also, I didn't didn't say it was easy (hence the "requires lots of disclosure" actually i mean discovery so thanks on that correction) - it is definitely not. But it is straight forward and very well defined. Royalty law is similar to family law in that there are a LOT of cases with lots of lawyers specializing in this. If you believe his case is special, I assure it, it is not.
Straight forward and easy are not the same things.
Sorry, I'm just using the dictionary definition of "straightforward," which is "easy to do or understand." I'm also a lawyer, and no lawyer on Earth would call a Hollywood-accounting case straightforward.
Perhaps we're using different terminology. I concede you are consistently writing it as two words, so maybe you don't actually mean the English word "straightforward."
I feel like if you are making it to the higher echelons of success, you typically have this type of track record.
A lot of companies start small by people who like what they do. It’s the business leader or visionary who sees the future and how to apply it on the larger scale usually leaving the loyalty and honor behind and doing what’s best for them and their company.
Just keep in mind that the movie is supposedly quite unfactual and the characters are portrayed very differently than they were in real life. In fact the co-ceo: Mike Lazaridis seems to want nothing to do with the film.
Pretty much. Capitalism is one big funnel of extraction so to get ahead of competitors you need some big advantage and one of the easiest to get in the US is just not paying people who can't afford to fight you over it in court.
Hardware synths, in particular the varieties that Moog makes, are at peak relevance again and who knows if that will remain the case. The brand was certainly sucking wind for a good 30 years of its history previously. Cashing out that equity now is a shrewd move...especially as consumer spending has gone to who knows where.
I don't think hardware analogy synthesizers are going anywhere anytime soon. Moog is probably facing a lot of competition though, and they aren't very active in the Eurorack modular space where a lot of the interesting new stuff is happening. (In particular, a lot of their popular synths, including recently released ones, are being cloned by Behringer.)
It would be interesting to know if they were doing great but sold because the offer was too good to turn down, or if they were in a financially precarious position and looking for an exit.
Not sure what the situation is for the employee's union. If a company gets acquired, does the union remain?
I think the recent clones of the moog studio3 devices must have been part of it. The clones are less than half the price of the originals, and are arguably better.
I suspect Moog saturated their own market. There are only so many people who want to pay $5000 for a new Minimoog, and most of them already had a reissue. Even fewer who want to pay $10k for an analog poly with mixed reviews and software issues.
We'll see what happens next. Given IM's history I would guess the Moog brand will be stuck on some generic mediocre products, and most of the US workers will be let go.
You have to be passionate about the specific sounds a synth offers to buy any synth at a $5k or $10k price tag. The OB-X8 from Sequential sounds fantastic but it still only gives you the palette of an analog polysynth for $5k. You have to be passionate about the Oberheim sound in order to pay that kind of money. Same with Moog or Gibson, you need some kind of passion for the brand in order to spend the money that they’re asking.
I would love it if they made some Eurorack modules. I have a DFAM and love it, but for most equipment I only consider Eurorack. The DFAM has to sit outside my case. The ergonomics of that are weird, and there’s only so much room for desktop equipment.
Yeah, but compared to their modules, it’s enormous. It would be a huge part of my case. And for the functionality it provides, it doesn’t really need to be that big. It has a great interface and it’s beautiful, but eurorack modules tend to pack their functionality into a tighter package. And I could imagine that if they put their minds to it, they could create smaller, more tightly focused modules than the semi-modular instruments that they tend to create.
It's kind of unfortunate that eurorack cases and power supplies tend to be so expensive. My approach is to use cheap Meanwell supplies (a pair of RS-35-12s wired in bipolar configuration rather than the more common RT-65b) and laser cut more racks out of birch ply when I need more space, but if I was paying full retail price for rack space I would probably be using much smaller modules, and fewer of them.
(This is my most recent design: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/84hp-rack-2row-slantback.svg -- the parts are made by running two jobs on the same file, always cutting red and alternating between cutting purple and blue. Turns out 3mm screws work fine in plywood if you can get the hole size just right.)
I think the answer is no. They may be more prevalent and widely adopted, but there's essentially no point in owning a hardware synth. It's been heading this way for a while, but the 5 years or so has really seen software modelling synths become almost free from drawbacks compared to soft synths.
I say this as someone that loathes soft synths, and loves playing with the hard synths. I absolutely despise the mouse interface outside of certain specific contexts, even outside of music.
There are a couple reasons. First, the fact is that you can create any sound from a hard synth on a soft synth given enough time. The sound quality will be better, or at least the same as a hard synth. Software can expand up until you run out of resources, so there's no limit on ENV, LFO... entire instances of the synth. There's probably use cases for getting two identical synths with different settings. Of course you can sample and layer, but even that is easier in DAW, either way.
So why even bother with the hardware synths in 2023? If you have a large amount of money, for a hobbyist, go ahead and get in the game. Be prepared to pay $1,000-20,000 or more, vs. $300-2000 for a good software setup.
It does feels more natural and like playing an instrument, and more fun to explore than a GUI. I can also move two knobs at once among a number of tricks in hard synths. This is a pain with software, even if you create macros, because you might not always want the same proportional adjustment in settings... ie. you can simultaneously turn on knob up and down (I imagine this is "possible" with DAW, but not natural and seamless).
There's another reason to use hardware. When you want a very specific sound, that you just know you can get easily from a specific synth. You could probably make a similar one with a generic synth, but don't want to. On the other hand, this is only necessary if a high quality plugin doesn't exist for your synth, which is unlikely unless it's an obscure one.
So, yes we're seeing a really interesting renaissance of hardware synths. This will continue for some time, and may not truly "end". However, right now they can't compete with hardware for easy control.
I can't help but think the control issue can be figured out, although it requires cooperation of a ton of different businesses, to support some number of controllers. Maybe this is truly impossible, but it seems do-able to have an array of knobs, and sliders... it's just that all the plugin companies would have to play around. I think NI has been doing this.
I think it's possible that we see more merging of DAW, controller, and plug-in. This is already occurring to a limited extent. DAWless machines are being loaded with single board computers that can run plug-ins. Your synth will also be a PC.
Anyway, what a rant, I'm sure no one will ever see this. Perhaps you can get by with just the learn button, but this has been a nightmare to me.
> but there's essentially no point in owning a hardware synth.
Not exactly. Some hardware synths are performance instruments in their own right. Something like the Expressive E Osmose, Roli Seaboard or Continuum Fingerboard are useful for their input capabilities, not for their synthesis methodology.
Also music is still often performed live and you're not going to get an organ's featureset out of software and a generic midi controller. The sounds, yes, but not the way you play it. There are ergonomic features to those kinds of hardware synths that are hard to replicate or even inferior when done with MIDI.
It’s sad how the entire music industry of actual innovators gets scooped up by conglomerates like InMusic.
What is worse, however, is the blatant rip-off business plan of Behringer. They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.
Wanna know why Behringers product line exclusively features other peoples designs that have gone out of patent (or not, see Mackie ripoffs they built their base with).
You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.
Behringer did release their own "Neutron" (and soon "Proton"), but I generally agree with your points. Also they've cloned Moog gear that's <10 years old.
I can blindly distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio and I don't even have good ears (at least for one instrument I did that experiment on). It's just a signal, I'm sure it can be copied perfectly but Moog still seems to be doing wrooms like no other.
> I can blindly distinguish distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio
Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard)
> It's just a signal
I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.
It would be funny if there was a community effort to make a schematic of the Neutron or Proton, design a board, and have it manufactured at JLCPCB or wherever. Sell it as a kit with all the SMD components already populated, all you have to do is solder in the through-hole jacks and pots and whatever. Use a Eurorack module form factor so it doesn't need an enclosure. Sell it at cost, which would probably be way less than the Behringer product sells for.
I think you are underestimating the difficulty of producing something. Just check what happens with 90% of kickstarters that need to produce stuff.
And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at producing these synths.
You can't make a business doing that, quite correct.
If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate.
I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will.
You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.
I think you are overestimating the difficulty of producing something. Start building stuff as a hobby, and decide that you want to build it as efficiently as possible because you are lazy. You'll quickly realize that building synthesizers and in particular Eurorack modules is easy and cheap if this is what you're focusing on.
What this means: with a Eurorack module, you don't need a case or power supply, since that's provided by the Eurorack "infrastructure". All you need is a "front panel" on your module as well as certain connectors, and probably one of the cheapest ways to build such a front panel is by manufacturing another PCB with the right size and the right holes. You can do that e.g. at JLCPCB, for <1€ per front panel. Building the synthesizer is similarly easy: design the circuit, create a PCB design that uses modern technology and SMT machine assembly, and you can get even "complex" designs manufactured cheaply, to the point that you can even beat Behringer yourself. After all, you don't have to live from selling such modules, and your development time is "free". And the best part: once you have a working design, you can get as many more modules manufactured as you want, for significantly decreasing prices if you manufacture them in slightly larger batches.
To give you an idea, I recently built a small PCB with "transistor ladder filters", but since they are small and cheap, I extended them and made the feedback path voltage controlled and also added a VCA directly after every filter. A PCB with 8 of them, manufactured and assembled at JLCPCB, cost around 30€. For completeness, this was for a 8 voice polyphonic Eurorack synthesizer module, which means this PCB didn't need any knobs/buttons/jacks/displays. Meanwhile Behringer sells a single "Moog VCF" in Eurorack format for >100€.
I will guess that you've never sold electronics at scale, with box, manual, per-country regulatory rules, customs, warranty, inventory etc. It's great that you have produced this small little module, but this is very far from what Behringer is doing. It's like comparing a personal Github repo with commercial software.
That's true that it's hard to run a profitable business doing this, but I think you're missing the point. If a person's goal isn't to earn a living but just have a hobby that financially breaks even selling kits on Tindie or whatever, the costs are surprisingly low.
Also,there's a lot of very good software used by many people that came from some person's personal github account. Hobbyist can and do compete favorably with commercial software all the time, but of course it's not as easy to make a living that way than it is to just put something out there that's useful.
I could see a well-motivated hobbyist or group of hobbyists doing the design for fun, or to make a point. People do similarly ambitious things all the time.
Behringer has impressive scale, but honestly I think for PCB manufacture and assembly, JLCPCB probably has them beat -- and any random hobbyist has access to JLCPCB.
The cost of Maths and Rampage has more to do with having to earn enough to pay all their employees and make a decent profit that the actual marginal cost of manufacturing one more module. Maths is very popular, but it's still a fairly low-volume market.
I think one thing it would be hard to compete with Behringer on is enclosures. But maybe that doesn't matter; a Neutron/Proton clone wouldn't necessarily need one if it's a Eurorack module.
While I'm no fan of Uli's business practises, he does expose the fact that the uniqueness of a lot of gear is way overstated. And we havent seen actual innovation from the likes of Moog, Roland, Korg since the 90:ies maybe. So if they insist on repackeging the same ROMpler and Curtis chips at ever higher prices... Clone away.
unfortunately he also clones things that aren't Rompler and curtis chips.
I have a behringer model d and a pro one. They're fine machines.
But when they Behringer Swing seems to me to be a 1:1 clone of the Arturia Keystep which is not an old device, I kind of understand why everyone hates Behringer.
Let's be clear: cloning stuff where the patent has expired is not remotely unethical in an intrinsic sense. Even if you launch the product the very day the patent expires.
It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents.
Society says:
- Ideas aren't things you can really own
- Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices.
- But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation.
- If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it.
- In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent.
That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law.
The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime."
Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term.
If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work.
Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that!
But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it.
There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?
It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out.
I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative.
They poison the well!
Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up.
Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.
Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap).
As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.
And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.*
This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection.
* Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.
Even Behringer gear gets 'cloned' by the likes of Mooer and Donner these days. It is the natural way / cost of doing business.
(rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3)
I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'.
Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.
Fundamentally I think the music industry has long-standing patterns to deal with this, anyway. It's hardly new.
Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.
They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone.
What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives.
There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.
That is a blatant distortion of the truth.
They have invested Nothing in New Designs, nothing For The Future, and I find your defense of Behringer utterly disingenuous.
Legacy: what legacy of designs, ORIGINAL DESIGNS, has Behringer left us?
R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. Name me ONE original Behringer product.
> R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design.
The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.
This is a misuse of the word “disingenuous”. “Disingenuous” is when someone pretends to be stupid, and there’s no valid reason to use that word here. “Disingenuous” is probably the most cliché and tired way to add unnecessary vitriol to a comment on HN.
Neutron, Proton, DeepMind, PolyD, Wing, X32, and the BCR series
The official line now is they're moving on from clones into original designs.
The real problem with Behringer is the low cost and not-a-trophy accessibility. No one complains about UDO's JP6 knock off or Groove's 3RD Wave, even though they're very close clones with a few added features.
Perhaps because they're reassuringly expensive trophy products, while Behringer's aren't.
Some of that old tech is starting to be very NOT cheap, as the chips haven't been manufactured in 30 years and stockpiles are growing ever slimmer. Germanium stuff for fuzz boxes for instance are now sometimes going for $50+ for a single transistor that would have been 25 cents a few decades ago.
Can you prove Behringer is actually loss-leading? Selling something that does not make normal profit? If you can prove that, why can't Moog?
It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently.
It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent.
There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.
Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.
If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.
Right. The pressure of a patent that is due to expire is itself a motivation to make a patentable improvement. And so the cycle repeats.
But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design.
It's in the nature of things.
I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.
Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)
Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.
And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).
You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.
I wasn't saying all of Behringer's business practices are good. But specifically cloning out-of-patent designs from the 80s is exactly what should be done by such a large mass-producer, those components should be commoditised!
Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.
Exploiting economies of scale is not loss-leading, though.
It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.
I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)
And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.
More to the point, you are saying that a small firm can't compete with Behringer, because Behringer can achieve an economy of scale.
But if e.g. Moog had patent protection, and all the product skill and knowledge and the killer brand, are you really saying that achieving the economy of scale was something they had never thought about, in all the time the designs were protected by innovation and design patents? They could not recognise the potential market and the possible economy of scale?
The reality is that they could have done exactly that (Marshall did, for example, and so did Fender and Gibson/Epiphone, who are not really harmed by their clone markets but have very successfully differentiated into them while selling a product that is largely unchanged for a human lifetime).
The strategy that Moog, and Leica, and Arca-Swiss, and any number of brands like this have to take is to make a virtue of making the thing the same way they always have, to the same standard they always have.
And if Behringer can say "we're not over-expensive like those guys", Moog can say "we're not cheap and nasty like those people". They can market into the clone market as a luxury, quality alternative (and even with a differentiated product -- like Fender did with the Mexican or Japanese ranges, with Squier etc).
Engaging with the idea that it is parasitic to implement an expired patent for low cost (which is wholly untrue and at odds with the system of patents itself), or buying into inaccurate definitions of "loss-leading" is in many ways just picking one of the sides in a war over a commoditised product with luxury roots. (If it is not also toying with anti-Chinese sentiment)
> Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.
Tho to be fair original maths is based on some old Buchla modules.
I have nothing against resurrecting stuff out of production or produced so long patent expired (they had their chance) but near-copy of current stuff is a bit much.
If you can't monetize your product within extremely generous patent lifetime giving it more time won't change much.
Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them.
> Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative
Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one.
I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money
Well patented stuff from 2 years ago is still covered by patent, so you can't copy it without getting sued usually. That's why the patent system exists.
You're using as an example of bad behavior one of the best examples of something good that Behringer has done. Those chips should be cloned, and now there are, I believe, at least three manufacturers of 3340 oscillator chips: CEM, Coolaudio, and Alfa. It's a very popular VCO chip in a number of eurorack modules, and has better tracking of volt-per-octave than any other analog VCO type I've used by far.
Also, not very long ago those chips had been out of production. I believe CEM re-released their 3340 in 2016. I'm not sure if Coolaudio beat them to it, but anyways there was a long period where the only way to get new batches of the chip would have been to clone it.
There are a lot of examples of legitimately bad behavior from Behringer as well.
Tell that to Curtis widow. The goal of this is not magnanimity but to drive other synth makers to bankruptcy with cheap zero R&D synths.
I am not speaking out of my behind here. If Behringer succeeds, the world of music gear LOSES.
If you want a 3340 clone buy Alfa for half the price and don’t feed CoolAudio
I'm sorry for her, but why do you think she's entitled to eternal earnings over this invention? When husbands die, the widow is lucky if they left behind savings and some real estate - that's what one should expect.
If this invention is so good, the original Curtis could have used his earnings at the time to buy other durable assets instead of expecting the invention to be giving dividends forever. Let's remember that every invention builds on top of many other invention that are leveraged free of cost (like the transistor in this case).
Were they accused of violating patents? I thought that was a copyright/trademark dispute, and the suit failed in part because copyright doesn't protect device manufacturers against competitors making a product with the same schematic. I think that's a good thing.
...Uli took a piss in your cereal or are you on a crusade or something, to defend every audio gear corp under the sun against evil Musictribe? There are so many others already doing the same, you don't need to waste your time.
I do use Alfa VCOs (or anyways AI Synthesis does, and I bought the chips through them to build some of their VCO modules), but it seems weird you'd recommend them over CEM, since presumably they're "ripping off" Curtis' design just as much as CoolAudio -- or does Alfa pay a licensing fee to CEM?
You might be right that Behringer is bad for the music industry in other ways and that I shouldn't support them through CoolAudio, but I don't see anything wrong with cloning an old chip. Patents are for a limited time and I think that's a good thing. If CoolAudio made an identical copy of the chip layout, maybe CEM could go after them for copyright violation, but I'm not aware of any claims that CoolAudio did that.
> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.
Because OnChip Systems were totally getting their act together and fulfilled the demand for vintage re-issues? Nope, not at all, they sat on their asses just like Roland.
(Nice annecdote re: sitting on their asses / not fulfilling market demand: It is an open secret Dave Smith didn't want to re-issue his old but very much in-demand designs but was basically forced by B's Pro-16 announcement to develop their P5 rev 4, otherwise the Seq fanbois would not have gotten that! Makes one wonder about the backstory of howbthe OB-X8 came to life...)
But at least Curtis' widow pulled off publishing a public statement condemning Behringer 'hurting' Curtis' legacy. Oh wow.
And what is your opinion on Alfa Rpar? Should they be disallowed to produce reissues too? Are you even aware of their existence?
I, for one, am very happy that Behringer is making $350 devilfish 303s despite what that nice fellow in Australia thinks about it. He wasn't going to get my money anyway.
Sure I am annoyed that in many cases they rip it 1:1 without improvement, and that they rip some products actively in production.
But in greater scheme of things it's some products authors already paid NRE few tens or hundreds times over vs musician having access to gear they couldn't dream of owning few years ago.
And I have absolutely no problems with cloning products already out of production.
> You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.
Oh you sweet summer child if you only knew how often the designs are copied with slight change in that space... hell, whole guitar pedal market is incest over incest for last 60+ years
> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.
...so the chip is still produced and people can use it vs possibly going out of business. How is that bad ?
Never owned one of their synths, but I have one of their expression pedals and I love it. It's also built like a tank, real quality. Hope that does not go away with the sale.
interesting. In my 20 years of using expression pedals, I've never seen that before. OP was suggesting it was somehow unique that a pedal would not have a power cord, but I'd reckon it's unique if it does have one.
I've got a Sub37. It's heavy as hell (physically and sonically) and has fallen off my keyboard stand onto a concrete stage floor at a rowdy gig. I played the rest of the song with it on the floor, no issues to this day.
There were some issues with the first batch though from what I've read. The filter pot would break because it used a much larger knob, later batches reinforced this.
For anyone who cares about electronic instruments, i really recommend taking the tour of their factory in Asheville NC if you're in the area. It's short, but cool and shows you how the instruments are put together.
On a related note, tours of the Steinway factory in Queens are super cool. My music class in high school went on a trip there, I thought it would be kinda boring but an excuse to miss class, yet it ended up being one of my favorite field trips growing up.
Yes! I did this tour, and it was surprising how much of their boards are hand assembled right there in the factory. Lots of discrete components. You also get to play some very expensive gear that you may never see elsewhere.
But everything is just so ungodly expensive. It's hard to justify getting two octaves that can play a single note for the same price as a used top-of-the-line baby grand piano.
Not really. It's an interesting sidebar how companies use the phrase "employee-owned" to confuse people about who is in charge. Moog had an ESOP which just means the employees held 49% of the shares of stock in the company, as far as I understand without any right to influence operations, which remained fully with the CEO. That's "employee-owned" in the same sense that you "own" my house if you hold securities that are invested in my mortgage, i.e. not at all.
Only in a marketing sense. A good friend of mine started a union drive there about a year ago and was met with fierce opposition from management, who proverbially holds the keys to the kingdom. Contract negotiations were ongoing when this happened
For a short time Moog curated Moogfest in Asheville and later Raleigh. It was an amazing blend of music, technology, talks, culture, etc. I think it ran into some trouble towards the end of it's run. I ended up going once (solo) after a friend had to bail out last minute. It was one of the most fun and enriching music festivals I've ever attended. I can't imagine it coming back after this news. If anyone knows of anything similar that still exists I'd love to know about it.
I went to one of those in 2016, the first one they had when they moved it to Raleigh (it was actually in downtown Durham). I loved it and sad that it's no longer happening. I saw some amazing acts, including Gary Numan doing a 3 night performance where each night he performed one of his first 3 albums (I only saw one of them)
There is a moogfest subreddit and it seemed like I went to a good one because the following ones weren't as well organized. But of course it's reddit and only hearing from a select few people
That's right! I confuse Raleigh and Durham. I was at that same year. Highlights for me were floating points, blood orange, karen gwyer, bicep, a jamaican soundsystem soundclash out in the park, denzel curry, and a live performance by sam aaron live coding on his sonicpi software
Similarly, post-covid, I don’t know if it will come back as good and engaging as it was before, but the Ableton Loop conferences. I went to the one in Los Angeles and bought flights for the one in Berlin that got canceled during the pandemic.
Awesome hands-on sessions and live music. Don’t need to be an Ableton user.
>The company has been bought by inMusic, a US firm that owns many other instrument, audio and DJ brands, including Numark, Stanton, Denon DJ, Akai, Alesis, M-Audio, Marantz and plugin company Air.
Marantz? Maybe some pro-audio part of Marantz with which I am unfamiliar, but Marantz consumer audio is now owned by Masimo, the medical equipment company.
"Nothing is changing" -- when the company buying you says this you should be concerned because it only means their strategy is to keep you 100% in the dark about what will change rather than partially.
Another interpretation (maybe even more negative) is that the leadership team is not experienced enough to understand what changes happen post-acquisition.
This means many employees won't be prepared for the changes, and many quit as the ground shifts beneath them over the next 5 years.
It also means leadership hasn't made a list of things that are worth fighting over vs which changes to accept, so they're not going to have a clear vision on how to defend the important parts of their culture.
This sounds like a bad development. Pre-inMusic Alesis produced impressive synths like the A6/Andromeda, Ion and Fusion. (Though I guess inMusic Alesis still sells their classic drum machines and some affordable digital pianos/controllers.)
Not that I was really into Moog's hardware pricing before, but at least they were forging their own path and doing some interesting things, from the Moog One monster synth to iOS apps like Animoog. I expect employee ownership gave them more freedom to pursue their own destiny rather than following the herd.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] thread> Roger Linn, who made many ground-breaking drum machines in the '80s before creating the MPC 60 for Akai, has accused O'Donnell of failing to pay him royalties after acquiring Akai, repeatedly calling him unscrupulous and a "bastard" in interviews.
Is it absolutely necessary to fuck people over to get to the top? Would love to get some counterexamples.
I've seen some pretty nasty stuff done in order to maximize profit... I don't want to be negative but there is a reason why these jobs attract a certain... profile... or if you can't "adapt" quickly, you're done.
Of course some small shops still exist when it comes to synths, especially in Europe where one manufacturer can make direct deals with European retailers, that's why the Eurorack module format is a thing. But these aren't "maximizing their profit". It's a scene that has loyal customers that are ready to pay a bit more for ethical purposes.
Does the market tend to find "inefficient" areas and someone comes in and "maximize efficiency"? I think Behringer is trying to catch all revenue in that space...
edit: changed some phrasing.
Yes. Behringer, from the start, was always about copying other brands and offer products to a larger audience through low prices. They used to do so with results of questionable quality... but not anymore. Their output in the synthesizers department has been excellent: low prices, good quality, good sound. They still rip off other brands for 95% of their stuff though... there is absolutely no imagination there. They see what works well in the market, come with a much cheaper version with a different (or not so much) design and it's done. Latest release, a Moog rip-off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LADPPcaN0
I kind of wonder if this was an intentional decision for Behringer or if Moog trademarked their interface and thus forced Behringer to do something different?
Some of the very old synths that Behringer has been cloning were probably protected by utility patents that covered the electrical circuits, but those have long expired, and I think trademarks become unenforceable if your aren't actively selling a product that uses it anymore. I don't have any moral objection to cloning the old synths either -- our laws have mechanisms to grant inventors exclusive use of their ideas for a limited time, but when that expires it's part of the commons. That's a good thing. I do think it's gross though to clone a popular recent synth just because you can and because the original designer didn't file the right paperwork to stop other people from doing that.
There's a continuous flamewar on /r/synthesizers between the people who think Behringer is a detestable parasite and the people who think they're making high-quality analog synthesizers available to the masses in a way that they never have before. I think both camps are right to a degree. I will defend Behringer's right to use the stuff that's clearly in the public domain, but I also think they have no class. They do things that damage their reputation even when it wouldn't have required much effort not to.
(I'm not an IP lawyer, so don't take this as expert commentary.)
Right -- same as 7Artisans / TTArtisan lenses. Genuinely impressive, affordable products, combined with a notable and surprising lack of self-respect where external design is concerned. At some level a lens barrel is a lens barrel, and the "big" brands are converging in their design language anyway as is normal, but the sooner these cheaper brands develop a consistent design language, the better.
https://cdm.link/2019/02/roland-303-808-trademarks/
I’m glad Behringer made them look completely different from the originals, though I’m still not quite sure how I feel about them cloning synths that have been on the market less than a decade (as opposed to their typical cloning of 30+ year-old synths). The compact format and addition of MIDI are meaningful changes, at least, and there is something to be said for making the entire trio accessible for about the price of one of the Moogs.
moog is selling very generic circuits, there's no intellectual property at stake, so rip off is I think is quite an exaggeration. The original moog pioneered the space, in less than two decades lost popularity in the face of newer ideas from competitors, and sold out to a big company that milked the brand name for awhile and also wanted to shut it down. The original founder got the rights back and basically pulled a Harley Davidson, made a nostalgic brand with premium pricing, "made in USA", employee ownership, etc.
There's a huge industry of competing synths, and moog's strategy of sitting on big fat brand margins gave them a cushion to old school, but also kept their nice sounding products out of the hands of young musicians. Young musicians getting started are the quintessential "starving artists". Behringer said "hey, these are generic circuits (not much more complicated than logic gates) and tons of people who can't afford them would like to use them. Modern scaled factory manufacture can bring them to the masses" and as a result they are very popular.
laying out the knobs in similar order? I mean, it's File-Edit-View and Cut-Copy-Paste, and laid out like the 6 strings of a guitar...
moog invented the ladder filter, it was amazing and unique, they patented it and enforced the patent. That was 50 years ago, the patent has expired.
This is a bit condescending. There’s much more nuance, variation, experimentation in synthesizer interfaces then what your comment suggests.
We are basically talking about the user interface, not the underlying synthesis engine/implementation. There is quite a bit of variety among synth interfaces that otherwise follow the standard subtractive synth mechanism of producing sound.
For a trivial example, is it a problem if a silverware company is selling spoons, forks and knives that look like all other spoons, forks and knives? With the intellectual property rights gone, many companies create a business around being efficient at production, distribution and marketing, which are not easy things to be good at!
Another example... We don't need a social media crypto cloud document editor, we need great, inexpensive, fast, polished, standard document editors.
Let's end this idea that everybody needs to be always imagining new things. Innovation is obviously good, but excelling at building things that leverage humanity's collective, public-domain intellectual property is also great.
Behringer are hit and miss on this. They killed it with their Minimoog clones - very, very close to the real hardware - but not so much with some of their later efforts.
I have their Pro-One and their K2 and both lack the character and warmth of the originals. They sound like clones.
The P800, Solina and Kat all seem very good though.
People who accuse Behringer of cloning are missing the point.
They used to literally copy circuit traces and component BOMs. That's just outright theft. But they don't do that now.
The recent synths are clones in name only. They keep the panel graphics and functions but reimplement updates of the original circuits with SMD parts on new board layouts using a new industrial supply chain.
They have a deliberate policy of building reusable platforms so the development costs can be spread across multiple products.
All of that is innovative, and there's a lot more involved than copying an old circuit.
There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss. But it's not necessarily more psychopathic than (say) Roland's approach, which is to keep reselling versions of the same technology - often with the same samples - over and over at cash-grab prices for a couple of decades.
No they're not... at least on the clones I have, they nailed it. And yes I have the originals.
It's like people who say that Arturia's VSTs are exactly like the real thing - to which I can only say "Huh???"
Thats quite some... BS. Gillet intented to exit the audio hardware industry in search of different, greener pastures already way before Brains was released. Also MI code is public, so 'cloning' is a stretch. MI designs were and are being produced by multiple shops.
I know the designs are open source and produced elsewhere, but it's not unreasonable to wonder if Brains was what finally pushed her over the edge.
https://www.gearnews.com/mutable-instruments-no-new-modules-...
Yes, Gillet has a history announcing ceasing development and production. Just read 'Have we been here before?', and also the last comment.
I bet people already asked Gillet directly if B's announcement contributed. I don't know, a) i don't care about vendor / personality cults, and b) their forums are gone.
Peter Van Hoesen has a really good review on YT about one of their Moog clones. He knows his shit and concludes it's overall pretty great.
I wonder who at Behringer was behind this crazy pivot. Can't recall seeing anything like it in any other industry.
The one I heard (and love because it's true) is that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off.
And for the ones still naive to not really understand what I mean: "Costs of labor", "handling fees", and similar line items in an invoice are merely an inverse reflection of how generous the guy billing you feels at that moment.
I don't know anything about this particular case.
That’s a favorite of mine. Written right after the attacks. But I wonder why he delisted it while still hosting the essay to make it hard to find but still accessible
https://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html
Paul Graham compares the hijacking of an airplane to a buffer overflow attack.
He doesn't claim that tools for writing more secure computer programs could prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane.
He proposes the idea that some similar reasoning can be applied to preventing hijackings. It's not enough to monitor who gets on the airplane carrying what, but to separate the cockpit space from the passenger space.
I don't think his point is very good because array overruns in a heap can be exploitable. Lisps (and other kinds of run-times) don't necessarily separate code from data in their heaps.
It's interesting that he feels shame about the article enough to delist it, but still believes he has a useful point enough to leave it up without linking to it
The best kind of mean for todays environment seems to be Machiavellian coated in a superficial gloss of magnanimity via stuff like effective altruism, longtermism, or wokewashing.
My thesis is that malicious behavior by executives is in some large percentage of cases not intentional but uncontrolled profit-seeking behavior by the ant-heap that is their organization.
Otherwise you have the "Just following orders" excuse.
This isn't an academic issue. Corporate harms are pervasive, very real, and hugely destructive to the economy and to the well-being of (at least) hundreds of millions.
> Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean.
I teach my son to be friendly.
The startup delivered the products and met the goals -just in time for Gibson to go bankrupt.
Inside Gibson there was endless corporate infighting. - an executive that was championing the acquisition of the startup was fired - the support was basically nonexistant afterwards (no marketing, nothing)
The best thing that Gibson has done recently has been to unify the Epiphone (their budget brand) line up with their lineup, and Epiphone’s quality has been a lot better since then in my experience. Now you can buy a relatively cheap Epiphone, slap some good aftermarket pickups in it, and have a really great Gibson-style guitar for a lot less than a Gibson.
This seems extremely straight forward to sue against? Basically the claim is either never paid for specific sales (very easy to win) or stated number of sales is lower than expected (requires lots of disclosure).
OR, maybe he did win in court and they simply ignored the court order?
"the Tolkien estate sued New Line, claiming that their contract entitled them to 7.5% of the gross receipts of the $6 billion hit.[23] According to New Line's accounts, the trilogy made "horrendous losses" and no profit at all."
I think most people would find it surprising that both Return of the Jedi and the Lord of the Rings movies failed to make a profit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
The fact that the trilogy was supposedly unprofitable shouldn't be relevant.
"maybe he did win in court and they simply ignored the court order" No, that doesn't happen in countries with solid legal systems, if it's a corporate defendant with easily identifiable assets.
This is just the nature of capitalism. The more capital you have, the more leverage you have.
The people who actually create the product are always at a disadvantage compared to those who own the means of that production.
You can try pooling resources together to negotiate collectively (unions), but without government intervention to put a thumb on the scale to try to even the playing field for unions vs corporations, even that would usually end poorly for the people who produce the actual product (see: union busting, the Pinkertons, etc.). Historically, they may actually even straight up just kill you for trying.
Capital also equals political power (even moreso since Citizens United), and corporations use that power to do everything they can to prevent that balance from tipping any direction but theirs.
right, so "extremely straight forward". You seem to think that "giving up a lot of money" somehow invalidates it being "straight forward".
Also, I didn't didn't say it was easy (hence the "requires lots of disclosure" actually i mean discovery so thanks on that correction) - it is definitely not. But it is straight forward and very well defined. Royalty law is similar to family law in that there are a LOT of cases with lots of lawyers specializing in this. If you believe his case is special, I assure it, it is not.
Straight forward and easy are not the same things.
Perhaps we're using different terminology. I concede you are consistently writing it as two words, so maybe you don't actually mean the English word "straightforward."
Have a nice day.
A lot of companies start small by people who like what they do. It’s the business leader or visionary who sees the future and how to apply it on the larger scale usually leaving the loyalty and honor behind and doing what’s best for them and their company.
[0]: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry
[1]: Interview with Jim Basille: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_VDXLJA8dA
[2]: ex-blackberry employee reviews film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yuqdr_1iRg
It’s not necessary but it’s so much easier.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=moog+defe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moog_Inc.
It would be interesting to know if they were doing great but sold because the offer was too good to turn down, or if they were in a financially precarious position and looking for an exit.
Not sure what the situation is for the employee's union. If a company gets acquired, does the union remain?
But yeah, I wish that they at least tried to improve upon original instead of blatant copy
We'll see what happens next. Given IM's history I would guess the Moog brand will be stuck on some generic mediocre products, and most of the US workers will be let go.
But I'd love to be proven wrong.
https://moogmusicsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000...
(This is my most recent design: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/84hp-rack-2row-slantback.svg -- the parts are made by running two jobs on the same file, always cutting red and alternating between cutting purple and blue. Turns out 3mm screws work fine in plywood if you can get the hole size just right.)
I say this as someone that loathes soft synths, and loves playing with the hard synths. I absolutely despise the mouse interface outside of certain specific contexts, even outside of music.
There are a couple reasons. First, the fact is that you can create any sound from a hard synth on a soft synth given enough time. The sound quality will be better, or at least the same as a hard synth. Software can expand up until you run out of resources, so there's no limit on ENV, LFO... entire instances of the synth. There's probably use cases for getting two identical synths with different settings. Of course you can sample and layer, but even that is easier in DAW, either way.
So why even bother with the hardware synths in 2023? If you have a large amount of money, for a hobbyist, go ahead and get in the game. Be prepared to pay $1,000-20,000 or more, vs. $300-2000 for a good software setup.
It does feels more natural and like playing an instrument, and more fun to explore than a GUI. I can also move two knobs at once among a number of tricks in hard synths. This is a pain with software, even if you create macros, because you might not always want the same proportional adjustment in settings... ie. you can simultaneously turn on knob up and down (I imagine this is "possible" with DAW, but not natural and seamless).
There's another reason to use hardware. When you want a very specific sound, that you just know you can get easily from a specific synth. You could probably make a similar one with a generic synth, but don't want to. On the other hand, this is only necessary if a high quality plugin doesn't exist for your synth, which is unlikely unless it's an obscure one.
So, yes we're seeing a really interesting renaissance of hardware synths. This will continue for some time, and may not truly "end". However, right now they can't compete with hardware for easy control.
I can't help but think the control issue can be figured out, although it requires cooperation of a ton of different businesses, to support some number of controllers. Maybe this is truly impossible, but it seems do-able to have an array of knobs, and sliders... it's just that all the plugin companies would have to play around. I think NI has been doing this.
I think it's possible that we see more merging of DAW, controller, and plug-in. This is already occurring to a limited extent. DAWless machines are being loaded with single board computers that can run plug-ins. Your synth will also be a PC.
Anyway, what a rant, I'm sure no one will ever see this. Perhaps you can get by with just the learn button, but this has been a nightmare to me.
Like the newest Ableton Push.
Not exactly. Some hardware synths are performance instruments in their own right. Something like the Expressive E Osmose, Roli Seaboard or Continuum Fingerboard are useful for their input capabilities, not for their synthesis methodology.
Also music is still often performed live and you're not going to get an organ's featureset out of software and a generic midi controller. The sounds, yes, but not the way you play it. There are ergonomic features to those kinds of hardware synths that are hard to replicate or even inferior when done with MIDI.
I just wasn't think about the innovative control surfaces. There's no point from a audio engineering / sound design perspective. It's purely about UI.
Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard)
> It's just a signal
I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.
And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at producing these synths.
If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate.
I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will.
You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.
What this means: with a Eurorack module, you don't need a case or power supply, since that's provided by the Eurorack "infrastructure". All you need is a "front panel" on your module as well as certain connectors, and probably one of the cheapest ways to build such a front panel is by manufacturing another PCB with the right size and the right holes. You can do that e.g. at JLCPCB, for <1€ per front panel. Building the synthesizer is similarly easy: design the circuit, create a PCB design that uses modern technology and SMT machine assembly, and you can get even "complex" designs manufactured cheaply, to the point that you can even beat Behringer yourself. After all, you don't have to live from selling such modules, and your development time is "free". And the best part: once you have a working design, you can get as many more modules manufactured as you want, for significantly decreasing prices if you manufacture them in slightly larger batches.
To give you an idea, I recently built a small PCB with "transistor ladder filters", but since they are small and cheap, I extended them and made the feedback path voltage controlled and also added a VCA directly after every filter. A PCB with 8 of them, manufactured and assembled at JLCPCB, cost around 30€. For completeness, this was for a 8 voice polyphonic Eurorack synthesizer module, which means this PCB didn't need any knobs/buttons/jacks/displays. Meanwhile Behringer sells a single "Moog VCF" in Eurorack format for >100€.
Also,there's a lot of very good software used by many people that came from some person's personal github account. Hobbyist can and do compete favorably with commercial software all the time, but of course it's not as easy to make a living that way than it is to just put something out there that's useful.
Also you underestimate economies of scale behringer can employ, I'd be surprised if you could get close to their price.
You can look at various DIY stuff and you will probably notice that getting stuff DIY isn't all that much cheaper
I'll throw you an example:
Maths, which Behringer cloned, costs ~$300 fully assembled
Befaco Rampage, which is pretty much equivalent to Maths, costs $185 in DIY kit.
Behringer Abacus is $100
They are basically selling them at price or below what DIY kit would sell, and not that far off "cost of components"
Behringer has impressive scale, but honestly I think for PCB manufacture and assembly, JLCPCB probably has them beat -- and any random hobbyist has access to JLCPCB.
The cost of Maths and Rampage has more to do with having to earn enough to pay all their employees and make a decent profit that the actual marginal cost of manufacturing one more module. Maths is very popular, but it's still a fairly low-volume market.
I think one thing it would be hard to compete with Behringer on is enclosures. But maybe that doesn't matter; a Neutron/Proton clone wouldn't necessarily need one if it's a Eurorack module.
I have a behringer model d and a pro one. They're fine machines.
But when they Behringer Swing seems to me to be a 1:1 clone of the Arturia Keystep which is not an old device, I kind of understand why everyone hates Behringer.
It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents.
Society says:
- Ideas aren't things you can really own
- Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices.
- But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation.
- If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it.
- In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent.
That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law.
The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime."
Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term.
If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work.
Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that!
But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it.
There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?
Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up.
Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.
As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.
This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection.
* Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.
(rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3)
I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'. Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.
Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.
What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives.
There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.
There's a running joke in photography that Leicas are a great choice for a dentist.
The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.
The official line now is they're moving on from clones into original designs.
The real problem with Behringer is the low cost and not-a-trophy accessibility. No one complains about UDO's JP6 knock off or Groove's 3RD Wave, even though they're very close clones with a few added features.
Perhaps because they're reassuringly expensive trophy products, while Behringer's aren't.
It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently.
It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent.
There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.
If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.
But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design.
It's in the nature of things.
I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.
Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)
Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.
And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).
You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.
Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)
Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.
It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.
I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)
And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.
But if e.g. Moog had patent protection, and all the product skill and knowledge and the killer brand, are you really saying that achieving the economy of scale was something they had never thought about, in all the time the designs were protected by innovation and design patents? They could not recognise the potential market and the possible economy of scale?
The reality is that they could have done exactly that (Marshall did, for example, and so did Fender and Gibson/Epiphone, who are not really harmed by their clone markets but have very successfully differentiated into them while selling a product that is largely unchanged for a human lifetime).
The strategy that Moog, and Leica, and Arca-Swiss, and any number of brands like this have to take is to make a virtue of making the thing the same way they always have, to the same standard they always have.
And if Behringer can say "we're not over-expensive like those guys", Moog can say "we're not cheap and nasty like those people". They can market into the clone market as a luxury, quality alternative (and even with a differentiated product -- like Fender did with the Mexican or Japanese ranges, with Squier etc).
Engaging with the idea that it is parasitic to implement an expired patent for low cost (which is wholly untrue and at odds with the system of patents itself), or buying into inaccurate definitions of "loss-leading" is in many ways just picking one of the sides in a war over a commoditised product with luxury roots. (If it is not also toying with anti-Chinese sentiment)
That's fine but they do stuff like this:
https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0E2V
https://www.arturia.com/products/keystep/overview
Where it is just a copied thing near 1:1 of product currently being sold, changed just enough to not be sued for making exact copy
And not just big companies but smaller modular ones like this:
https://synthanatomy.com/2023/05/behringer-abacus-a-ripoff-o...
Tho to be fair original maths is based on some old Buchla modules.
I have nothing against resurrecting stuff out of production or produced so long patent expired (they had their chance) but near-copy of current stuff is a bit much.
Behringer is essentially producing a copy of Ford-T...
Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them.
> Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative
Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one.
I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money
Also, not very long ago those chips had been out of production. I believe CEM re-released their 3340 in 2016. I'm not sure if Coolaudio beat them to it, but anyways there was a long period where the only way to get new batches of the chip would have been to clone it.
There are a lot of examples of legitimately bad behavior from Behringer as well.
If this invention is so good, the original Curtis could have used his earnings at the time to buy other durable assets instead of expecting the invention to be giving dividends forever. Let's remember that every invention builds on top of many other invention that are leveraged free of cost (like the transistor in this case).
However, what is wrong with perfectly cloning a chip whose patents have expired?
Analogy would be with a drug whose patents have expired. If generic analogs are available, everone benefits except the original company.
Everyone wins, who is the loser here?
Curtis family have the right to be upset but they do not have the right to perpetual profits.
https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-...
Go outside, it is very healthy :)
You might be right that Behringer is bad for the music industry in other ways and that I shouldn't support them through CoolAudio, but I don't see anything wrong with cloning an old chip. Patents are for a limited time and I think that's a good thing. If CoolAudio made an identical copy of the chip layout, maybe CEM could go after them for copyright violation, but I'm not aware of any claims that CoolAudio did that.
> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.
Because OnChip Systems were totally getting their act together and fulfilled the demand for vintage re-issues? Nope, not at all, they sat on their asses just like Roland.
(Nice annecdote re: sitting on their asses / not fulfilling market demand: It is an open secret Dave Smith didn't want to re-issue his old but very much in-demand designs but was basically forced by B's Pro-16 announcement to develop their P5 rev 4, otherwise the Seq fanbois would not have gotten that! Makes one wonder about the backstory of howbthe OB-X8 came to life...)
But at least Curtis' widow pulled off publishing a public statement condemning Behringer 'hurting' Curtis' legacy. Oh wow.
And what is your opinion on Alfa Rpar? Should they be disallowed to produce reissues too? Are you even aware of their existence?
You can compete on differentiation, niche, or cost right? That’s all good business and good for the consumer.
Ideas are only as valuable as their execution makes them. Otherwise, there’d be lots of “ideas” for sale on eBay.
But in greater scheme of things it's some products authors already paid NRE few tens or hundreds times over vs musician having access to gear they couldn't dream of owning few years ago.
And I have absolutely no problems with cloning products already out of production.
> You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.
Oh you sweet summer child if you only knew how often the designs are copied with slight change in that space... hell, whole guitar pedal market is incest over incest for last 60+ years
> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.
...so the chip is still produced and people can use it vs possibly going out of business. How is that bad ?
Electro-Harmonix ships an expression pedal with the HOG2 that uses an accelerometer rather than a pot, and that also takes a power cord or batteries.
There were some issues with the first batch though from what I've read. The filter pot would break because it used a much larger knob, later batches reinforced this.
Really shows how the people there love music and what they do.
But everything is just so ungodly expensive. It's hard to justify getting two octaves that can play a single note for the same price as a used top-of-the-line baby grand piano.
Here's some more info about the 2016 lineup https://www.brooklynvegan.com/moogfest-announ/
There is a moogfest subreddit and it seemed like I went to a good one because the following ones weren't as well organized. But of course it's reddit and only hearing from a select few people
https://www.reddit.com/r/moogfest/comments/t3egho/is_moogfes...
Awesome hands-on sessions and live music. Don’t need to be an Ableton user.
Marantz? Maybe some pro-audio part of Marantz with which I am unfamiliar, but Marantz consumer audio is now owned by Masimo, the medical equipment company.
Welcome to the 60’s!
This means many employees won't be prepared for the changes, and many quit as the ground shifts beneath them over the next 5 years.
It also means leadership hasn't made a list of things that are worth fighting over vs which changes to accept, so they're not going to have a clear vision on how to defend the important parts of their culture.
hopefully the pre-acquisition hardware will increase its resale value and I'm sitting on a goldmine :D
Any future release from Moog will now have budget components and mass production build.
https://shop.synthesizers.com/ (I don't make money off this any longer.)
Not that I was really into Moog's hardware pricing before, but at least they were forging their own path and doing some interesting things, from the Moog One monster synth to iOS apps like Animoog. I expect employee ownership gave them more freedom to pursue their own destiny rather than following the herd.