Frankfurt Musikmesse

[Haible Juergen]

Hi,
I was there, in Frankfurt, on Sunday.
A few impressions:

MAM showed their Vocoder VF11. I have written a lot before about
this phantastic device, so I won't repeat all my praises here again.

MAM also showed the prototype of their PS-3100-style Resonator.
Yes, an optoelectronic triple BP filter, like the Korg polyphonic
modulars
had, plus stereo outputs, two LFOs and frequency-selective envelope
followers. I think it will be in the DM300 ... DM400 price range.

"MOOG" (quotation marks intended - Don Martin stuff ...) was there
as well. A few modules only, but they were actually working. I could
play with the patchcords and all. Sound? Can't really say, because
I don't own a real Moog system myself. Filter mod range was a little
low - strange. The friendly guy from the booth (don't remember the name;
it was the German distributor) showed me the interiors of a VCO driver
module. Modern green PCB material, but scattered with components as
sparesly as the original, so chances are good that they didn't change
too much. The friendly guy said they changed nothing at all, and
they will also rebuild the minimoog originally. I asked about the
uA726's,
and he confirmed that they would use original components in the whole
instrument. I'm sceptical, especially about the 726's - but time will
tell.
As I had the bad experiences of some people on the list in mind, I asked
if they had anything shipped yet. First the answer was yes, then after
inquiring harder, the answer was "maybe just a prototype was sold to
someone".
They also want to built an ARP 2600 in the future.
Well, I know how controversal this whole topic is, and so I tried just
to pass the information on, without drawing any conclusions for
myself.

Roland showed a nice Hammond-style organ. I really loved this one.
Far better than the Suzuki XB-2. Far too expensive for me (DM 3800,-)
at the emoment, but in a few years it will be interesting to replace
my CX-3.

JH.