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comment by blackfox026
blackfox026  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, what's your "Holy Grail?"

The Moog Modular System 55 synthesizer:

They go for $35,000





kleinbl00  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The patents on those old synthesizers are all expired now. If there aren't people building less crazy expensive clones there should be.

kleinbl00  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not as simple as all that. A lot of the chips were proprietary and not documented. Reverse-engineering the circuits isn't impossible but in many cases it's far easier if the original manufacturers cooperate.

And yes, I realize those are all software emulations. Thing is, the desire for hardware is extremely limited and there aren't any real economies. It still helps when you're a big company. Aside from all the Curtis chips (I had a Chroma Polaris that someone bought off me just to resurrect an errant PPG 2.3) in later years there were a lot of ASICs, particularly by Roland and Yamaha. Cooking those chips actually killed Alesis.