RedLeo wrote:I agree that designing any electronic keyboard these days is a complex and difficult set of financial and design compromises and choices. My hat's off to people and companies like Nord and Dave Smith, i wish more people could grasp just what they're doing to produce all these wonderful machines.
I think it's always been hard. i remember reading an interview with Dave Rossum of E-Mu who said that they were basically struggling all along the way, despite the huge success of the Emulator and Emax series. And Moog Music had problems even from the start, building cheap guitar amplifiers in order to get cash flow.
ricard wrote:Unfortunately, to keep the number of controls down, they've minimized the architecture to the point where it actually starts making the machine more awkward to use IMHO. It really annoys me as an engineer as I know what hardware they have and know what they could have done with it.
With respect, I think you're seeing this slightly wrong. The minimised architecture isn't a compromise, it's a deliberate design choice. The A1 is intended to address a market where people wanted fast results without a full set of panel controls to wade through. Personally, I don't get it. I don't see that 2 or 3 envelope shaper knobs rather than 4 makes any difference, or that a "single oscillator plus" structure rather that 2 properly featured oscillators is really going to speed up your workflow significantly.
No disrespect taken. But I think we actually share the same view but perhaps from different angles.
I don't see either that the oscillator or envelope concept on the A1 actually makes it easier to operate, quite the contrary. So my theory is that the though process started out with "how do we create a budget Nord Lead", then "if we give it fewer controls it will be cheaper and also easier to operate", then "so let's sell it as an easier-to-operate machine at a budget price". So in my opinion, yes, it's a conscious design desision, but driven by a desire to keep the price down, and then marketed as easier to operate. Clever, in the end. As you said, the design in practice doesn't seem to accomplish this goal, although to be honest, from what I've heard it is considered easer to operate by people who have never used a synth before.
But here it is: Nord decided that there was a market for a synth with a stripped-down interface, so they designed and built the A1 specifically for that market. And they were right, it's been hugely successful. Clever girls...
Agreed. Hats off to them for daring to try this and succeeding at it. I don't know how well it has sold though, I know they won the TEC award at NAMM 2015 but I don't think that is related to the sales volume in any way.
So the soft knob and display concept is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to achieve with this synth. And I have to say, that while I understand the elegance of that approach in engineering terms, it's an approach I will never return to. After decades of menu-driven keyboards, going back to one knob-per-function is a breath of fresh air. As a musician, the convenience, speed and sheer simple joy of it far outweighs any limitations in terms of features.
I agree about menu driven synths. But taking the Audiotingies P6 UI as an example, it is actually not menu driven. There are a number of buttons, which basically select pages of information. So if you press FILTER, it brings up the filter page. Press OSC and you get the page for oscillator 1. You don't have to arrow-key your way though menus, or scroll through them with some selector knob, and then press exit when you're ready. In the beginning it can be difficult to remember the architecture, but on the other hand you get the huge advantage of visualization: whenever you call up a parameter page, you see what the parameters are set to. That is one of my main gripes with the A1: If you call up a patch, you have for idea what modulates what, because it's all set by the Mod Depth parameters which you have no idea what they're set to, unless you hold the Monitor button and twiddle a knob. At least on the Nord Lead 2 the mod routings are selected by buttons and shown on LEDs, so they are immediately visible. This means that the architecture of your patch is right in front of you. And because they've "simplified" matters with only a single envelope, plus an LFO-come-envelope generator, if you hear a filter sweep, you don't know if it's being generated by the envelope or LFO. If you had a dedicated filter envelope you'd know exactly what to tweak if you wanted to change it. That's why I'm saying that the simplified A1 front panel actually makes it harder for me to visuallize the current patch, and therefore harder to tweak it. Part of that could be unfamiliarity on my part (related to the comment above that newcomers seem to "get it" in a better way), but the lack of visualization is still there.
So, my point is that by 'simplifying' the synth, they have actually made it harder to operate than for instance an NL2. And since I suspect that the simplification is not originally driven by a desire to make it easier for the user (because to me it isn't easier at all), I'd rather save that money by using an UI that might have a slightly steeper learning curve becuase you don't have all those knobs to twiddle, but which fairly quickly offers significant payback because you can actually visiualize your patch so you have a much better idea of what to start tweaking. And because you'd have a UI that didn't require compromises in the architecture, you could have your dedicated filter envelope, with a full set of ADSR controls. And a filter tracking parameter that doesn't require you to take both hands off the keyboard...
Plus that having 8 knobs and 12 buttons means that you don't have to move your hands all over the front panel to edit things, so it can be faster too. A full front panel of knobs is nice if the knobs have a dedicated function and the architecture isn't too hard to grasp, but beyond that it starts to appear lacking IMHO.
I agree, everyone's been so impressed with the Prophet 6 that they haven't looked at the price carefully enough. This is not a budget-priced synth by any means. It's a lot to pay for a monotimbral 6 voice machine. Dave Smith is an awesome man, but it's clear that building a commercially-viable fully analog polysynth is still a very tall order. Modern component technology has not yet provided the magic answer.
Yes, analog technology still requires a lot of components, even if they are smaller these days.
I have resolved never to read the manual for an Alesis Andromeda - I might want one! Like the Memorymoog, buying one is a serious risk. Ultimately a Memorymoog is always completely fixeable if you throw enough money at it. An A6 might not be. Keep this handy:
http://www.instrumentalparts.com/ala6ansppa.html
I agree up to a point, but only because the custom chips in the A6 are only used in the A6; the Memorymoog is choc full with Curtis chips, some of which are becoming pretty scarce, on the other hand, there were more of them around to start with, and they seem fairly reliable.
and something that feels fresh and fun to play with coming from other tweak-until-you-loose-yourself synths and modulars. 
