[A6] MIX Mode --- was (SoundDiver and the a6

[David Evans]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 09:32:15AM -0500, Chad Gould wrote:
> Yeah, the same people would buy it: not many. A few top-quality musicians
> and deep-pocketed hobbyists can afford $3000 synths. That does not include
> most of the dirt-poor techno community. :P The cost is a bit of the bugger. 
> 

  Agreed.  Not many are prepared to justify this kind of cash on a synth.
Look at how the AH crowd (the perfect market for the A6, one would think)
bitched and moaned about the price.

> In addition, Alesis also failed to make low-cost spinoffs from their
> flagship. This I didn't understand. Maybe they didn't have time.
> 

  I imagine that timing was a big issue, yes.  Then, once they re-formed,
the issue was designing stuff in an affordable manner.  Perhaps an A6
spinoff didn't fit in that category.  *However*, I can say that a lot
of what they learned from the A6 seems to have appeared in the Ion.
I bet that would have been a very different synth if it weren't for
the A6 influence.

> In retrospect, I wonder if releasing this under the "Alesis" name may have
> not been the best idea.

  A lot of people bitched and moaned about that too, saying that it
must be crap because it came from Alesis.  However, I doubt they
could have afforded to built up a new brand from scratch...though
perhaps they could have purchased the Bahn name for a good price.

-- 
David Evans                                         dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer/Synth Junkie     http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/
University of Waterloo         "Default is the value selected by the composer
Ontario, Canada           overridden by your command." - Roland TR-707 Manual