Moog sells its business to InMusic
ra.co
ra.co
> 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.
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?
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=moog+defe...
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!
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.
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.
hopefully the pre-acquisition hardware will increase its resale value and I'm sitting on a goldmine :D
https://shop.synthesizers.com/ (I don't make money off this any longer.)
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 ?
Any future release from Moog will now have budget components and mass production build.