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Kurzweil bought


mildbill

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No, I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm just old enough to remember the Zim-Gars and other SearsCatalog-type guitars that defined cheap in the 60s & 70s, and a modern-day Samick is light-years beyond those in quality. The Samick's neck doesn't bow at the slightest change in temp/humidity, and while it doesn't have the action of a LesPaul it's still reasonably easy to play. If your student equipped with a properly adjusted Samick cannot play, it probably ain't the fault of the guitar.

 

Yes I do play guitar, for almost 25 years now. I own an Antonio Lorca classical, a Fender Strat, and others, and I've played perhaps three hundred gigs as a guitarist (mostly in the late 80s - early 90s). I'd like to think my opinion counts for something lol

 

Originally posted by SaloSicle:

Sorry, this isn't intended as any kind of attack, I'm just astonished.

If you were being sarcastic, it didn't really come across that way. :)

I used to think I was Libertarian. Until I saw their platform; now I know I'm no more Libertarian than I am RepubliCrat or neoCON or Liberal or Socialist.

 

This ain't no track meet; this is football.

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Now this has morphed into a guitar topic, interesting. We can try to bring this full circle with our next discussion on guitar synthesizers & peizo pickups. :cry:

(Of note: I still love my K2500 with all the bells & whistles.)

 

:

One of the things about these forums that both amazes and annoys me is how threads can take turns OT
Just like a real-life conversation, except here you still have a chance to respond to an earlier point that slipped by, try doing that in a room full of people. Feel free to start a new topic if you like.
"I'm not a monkey anymore..."
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In first talking about Samick I tried to steer the thread back to Kurz. Then someone addressed my uality-control remarks relative to Samick, and I posted more about their QC (which I feel will be important to Kurz customers). But since you mentioned guitar synths, I will use that as a lever to once again redirect back to Kurzweil....

 

One day, I will get a guitar synth. When I do, my Kurz ExpressionMate will likely be the controller of patch changes for the guitar synth. So I hope Samick's QC is real good - in case my ExpMate ever needs servicing.

(How'd I do? :D )

I used to think I was Libertarian. Until I saw their platform; now I know I'm no more Libertarian than I am RepubliCrat or neoCON or Liberal or Socialist.

 

This ain't no track meet; this is football.

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Originally posted by Jeff Da Weasel:

Originally posted by burningbusch:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with selling a product for whatever price the market will bear.

I completely agree. :thu:

 

This is what defines capitalism. What Busch says is true, though there are lots of variables. The main ones in this (and most) industries are:

 

- Accepted price/performance ratio that defines the value (including intangibles like audio quality).

 

- Manufacturer's cost of design, manufacture and marketing plus reasonable profit margin. This is a formulaic thing.

 

- Uniqueness.

 

The third thing is particularly important. If it could be argued (and to a high degree I think it can) that the K2000 had a unique feature set and sound generating capability that no other board at the time offered, they should have sold it for every bit as much as the market was willing to pay for it. What it cost them to create it in R&D and manufacturing) is irrelevant.

 

The other factors that determine more specific pricing involves buyer's psychology. Even though your profit formula may say that a product needs to retail at $783, you'll have better sales at either $749 or $799. And, in fact, if you have something that fills a unique need in the market, why not sell it at $999? Most people don't differentiate that much between $700 - $1000.

 

Okay, enough marketing 101. ;)

 

- Jeff

Don't forget also the one variable we seem to be overlooking: the external march of technology that MI companys must always now keep their collective eye on. An example in my mind is Alesis. Alesis could do no wrong in the industry from the time they were formed in a garage in 1984 in LA with their inexpensive effects and then came the MMT-8 and HR-16; they were the innovators and standard bearers for the project studio musician. Then came ADAT. The absolute right product at the right time! But also, a little later somthing else was happening outside their sphere of influence, Windows 95, fast Pentiums and Power PC chips, big fast hard drives.

 

When the marriage of Computers and digital audio came on the scene instead of embracing it and innovating once again, they kept trying to squeeze as much out of the ADAT as they could while the tide was turning towards the computer as the new medium for artistic expression for the electronic recording musician. Even now with the HD24, they are not selling well at all like the ADAT tape based machines did.

 

You have to go where the market leads you; this is why companys like M-Audio are doing so well, they are defining the segment of computer audio recording peripherals and related accessories!

This way, no, wait, that way!
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LOL! (Of note, again)I mentioned this because I got into the guitar synth game about 10 years ago with a Roland GR1 (Hence, the crying smilie :cry: ). Got out of that game 2 years later, selling the GR1 for about 1/3 of what I paid for it... which brings us back to the depreciation topic (we're almost there).

THis is still a very interesting thread, lots of knowledgeable folks out there. Keep it up!

 

Originally posted by coyote:

In first talking about Samick I tried to steer the thread back to Kurz. Then someone addressed my uality-control remarks relative to Samick, and I posted more about their QC (which I feel will be important to Kurz customers). But since you mentioned guitar synths, I will use that as a lever to once again redirect back to Kurzweil....

 

One day, I will get a guitar synth. When I do, my Kurz ExpressionMate will likely be the controller of patch changes for the guitar synth. So I hope Samick's QC is real good - in case my ExpMate ever needs servicing.

(How'd I do? :D )

"I'm not a monkey anymore..."
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This is a reply to Sound Meister post above without copying all the stuff:

 

I am referring to market capitalization-the stock price times # of shares outstanding. If a company is sound and has good profit prosepects moving forward it will be reflected in its perceived value. Young Chang had a market cap of $12 million. In the business world that's NOTHING. Note that the company was bought out by a lesser rival, and that the price went DOWN when its was being purchased (both unusual). Yamaha's (non-motor) market cap is $3.5 billion; Roland is ~ $ 350 million. If Young Chang was healthy (profitable, without a lot of debt) you would have expected its stock price to be 20 times what it was.

 

I wouldn't dismiss the NAMM data so casually. Note that during the same period that shows a steady decline in sampler sales the following products had trend lines in the opposite direction (mean sales increased year after year): ac guitars, el guitars, fretted instruments, amplifiers, speakers, grand pianos, digital pianos, brass instruments, string instruments, woodwinds, microphones, print music, signal processing, cables, drums and percussion, software and sound cards. The "saturated market" rational could easily be applied to any of these mature product segments. Also in the NAMM report "Gains in computer-based products have primarily come at the expense of dedicated hardware products such as hard-disk recorders, rack-mounted samplers, and sequencers).

 

When I asked the Emu people at the NAMM show about the decision to drop hardware samplers, they said "the writing has been on the wall for some time."

 

I forgot about performing live. I do use a laptop live (sampler plus soft synths) and it works exceedingly well. I was going to get a Motif ES but my S90 + laptop is far more powerful, plus being lighter and more compact. More and more people are becoming comfortable with this type of setup. Large shows couldn't live without all the computers behind the stage.

 

Busch.

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Originally posted by burningbusch:

When I asked the Emu people at the NAMM show about the decision to drop hardware samplers, they said "the writing has been on the wall for some time."

Perhaps the writing was on the wall for E-mu. As noted previously, Korg and Yahama have on the market today current model instruments with full fledged hardware sampling capabilities.

 

We keep coming back to the issue of causality - i.e., are softsampler sales causing a downturn in hardware sampler sales? We stil have no data to support that, just some anecdotal comments. I suspect ROMplers have been more damaging to hardware sampler sales than anything. Over the past 10 years ROMplers have been designed to offer ever increasing "bang for the buck", i.e., more sounds at lower prices. Korg probably had something to do with it when they started to make scaled down models of more expensive Romplers. Specifically, I believe they designed their X series instruments for folks who weren't willing to pay for a big 01/W pro keyboard. This was ten years ago. Since then Korg has brought out a number other hobbyist type instruments.

 

More recently, Roland introduced their JV1010. This represented a repackaging of their high end JV1080 and JV2080 in order to reach folks who weren't willing to purchase the more expensive flagship instruments.

 

Basically what we have been seeing is an industry in search of a market. Making sampling available to those who already own a computer and don't want to buy a hardware sampler would seem to be another form of diversification.

 

Regarding Kurzweil. As someone noted recently, VAST is still a state of the art synthesis technology. A simple computer based sample playback rig is not in the same league with the Kurzweil VAST systems. I don't see where there would be competition between types of music technologies that don't so the same things. Someone who only wants to play back samples definitely should not buy a Kurzweil.

 

To really make a case for the ascendance of softsamplers, we'd have to see specific sales trend data. Ideally it would not be mixed up with recording and sequencer software sales data.

 

Thanks,

 

~Peter Schouten

Pyramid Sound Productions

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Originally posted by coyote:

No, I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm just old enough to remember the Zim-Gars and other SearsCatalog-type guitars that defined cheap in the 60s & 70s, and a modern-day Samick is light-years beyond those in quality. The Samick's neck doesn't bow at the slightest change in temp/humidity, and while it doesn't have the action of a LesPaul it's still reasonably easy to play. If your student equipped with a properly adjusted Samick cannot play, it probably ain't the fault of the guitar.

OK, well we've had very different experiences then.

 

The Samicks I saw were definitely as bad as you describe above, and worse! I'm talking about tuners that unwind from the tension of playing the strings, making them impossible to tune. Nuts with randomly placed slots resulting in some strings being too close to each other and others too far apart. I'm not even sure that the frets were properly spaced. Similar problems on multiple guitars that I saw/played. Yeah, they may be better than a guitar you'd find at Sears, but that's not saying very much is it? ;)

 

Anyway, perhaps they have improved since then. One would certainly hope.

 

BTW guys, we are talking about the company that just bought Kurzweil here, I think this is very in-topic to the discussion. I don't think I could have much other reason to talk about Samick ;)

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Originally posted by Geoff Grace:

... a few years ago I was up all night re-sequencing and tracking a song from scratch in Digital Performer because my Logic Audio dongle died the day before I had to produce a vocal session. I pulled it off and managed to be there, Pro Tools song file in hand, for the vocal tracking; but it was a frustrating waste of time and energy.

And what happens with multiple dongles?...

 

I try to see the issues from the point of view of the end iuser. Soft samplers allow you to load larger samples and more samples at a given time. That's potentially very important, although multitracking is a way around RAM limitations. Now I have a couple of questions:

 

1) Apart from the RAM limitation, why should someone should be prepared to take a beating when they sell off their hardware samplers and go the softsampler route?

 

2) For the next generation of musicians who are getting into samplers, why would they prefer softsamplers over hardware?

 

~Peter Schouten

Pyramid Sound Productions

Specializing in Kurzweil K2x00

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