Is there any truth to the rumor that the way you can tell the new choir is Russian is that they sing "da" instead of "ah?"
A dedicated, digital Mellotron reproduction? While a fun idea to be able to bring our choice sounds onstage, there's a lot of problems. 2500 Mellotrons sold from the beginning until now? That's not a lot of units. It would be difficult to persuade any company that is a good idea, because if the real thing didn't sell any better, then why would anyone imagine the repro would sell?
Seems to me it would take a pretty good chunk of ROM to be able to put the extant Mellotron library at full fidelity and full length. It would also be difficult to persuade a company today to not "improve" the sounds and take out the chair squeaks and bow thunks and giggles and farts and other phantom sounds that undoubtedly exist sprinkled through the library. It would be interesting to see if it passes the "that sound" test, because I think the translation from live to tape to digital might lose some of the "tape-y" sound of the instrument.
I notice on my electronic keyboards that the upper notes of string sounds always sound a bit tremoloed from the shorter length of the loops used due to the nature of the transposition of multi-samples and that playing octaves always leads to a certain amount of phase cancellation, things that just don't happen with the Mellotron. That full eight-second "sampling time" per note gives each note its own individual character, something that just doesn't happen in the digital world at this time, and you never get that sense of "whee-ooo whee-ooo whee-ooo" of sustained loops beating against each other.
So unless you can give me something that really sounds, acts, and looks authentic, I'm probably not going to be very interested. I admit, I'd sure love to have something that felt, sounded and looked like a Mark II to use, but I'm just not sure that there would be enough of a market to convince a major manufacturer to get involved. However, maybe there are some financial angels that our existing Mellotron gurus might bump into to be able to start developing such an instrument - hmmm, Mellotron Mark 2002, perhaps?