[sdiy] Ways for innovation

[Richie Burnett]

> Why does my 150 dollar phone have a better screen than my 3000 dollar 
> synth?

Musical instruments are still very much a niche market, despite what we 
would like to think.  Even more so for the pro-audio end of the market, when 
compared to the Korg Volca type "toys".  The volumes are miniscule compared 
to mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and digital photo frames.  So the 
designs are very cost sensitive.  Sure you can get snazzy touch sensitive 
1080p OLED screens for a few dollars if you buy them in the hundreds of 
thousands, but the price goes up steeply for lower volumes.  And these 
screens are often "controllerless" modules that need complex high-speed 
digital interfaces continuously pumping data just to keep the screen 
refreshed, so there are implications for the complexity and cost of whatever 
is driving the screen.

It's easy to connect an industry-standard 20x2 alphanumeric LED screen onto 
a DSP or micro, or even a low-end OLED screen, so that's what most of the 
synth manufacturers do.  It's a step up in cost and complexity to fit a more 
impressive screen, and those additional costs are harder to absorb if the 
sale volumes are tiny.

You can now see why the VST route is so tempting.  You have vast CPU power 
available to you that grows each year in line with Moore's law, giga-bytes 
of memory, and megapixels worth of LCD screen(s) space for display.  So if 
you're a wannabe DSP developer it's the easiest route to making an 
instrument using a general purpose PC platform with all of the investment 
that has and continues to go into relentlessly pushing PC technology 
forward.

The biggest advantage of hardware synths for manufacturers is the 
copy-protection.  Sure you could run a Nord Lead synth engine or Access 
Virus synth engine on one of your i5 CPU cores, but that VST engine would be 
highly pirated.  So, in my opinion the hardware interface has become the 
ultimate copy protection dongle!

-Richie,