Just my two cents:
2015-03-30 3:16 GMT+02:00 D F Tweedie bienpegaito@... [xl7] <xl7@yahoogroups.com>:
Not crazy ... just supply and demand. And it goes to show the timeless value of good hardware technology.
The supply is quite scarce here, and mostly due to the fact, that when those ROMs (and the instruments they were built into) showed up, they were rather overpriced - just look at their prices after few years, or even now. Thus market didn't respond well, and the development of a good hardware technology got thwarted. The truth is, that Phatt & Xtreme ROMs are cheap not because of their samples' quality, but because of their popularity.
Crazy prices kept quoted may result in people not willing to sell their not-used anymore ROMs for less than certain unrealistic price. One day I managed to score a PK-6 with the new Composer, both Orchestrals and Vintage for 200 EUR. I would not pay more than 150EUR for a ROM, even for Vintage or Holy Grail, because it's the same craziness, which fuels the analog madness.
However, I'm thinking of a small database (shared document?), where people could quote the prices they paid and they would be willing to pay for particular ROMs. The results could be surprising...
How much are Stradavari going for these days?
Who cares? They are not compatible with E-mu ROMs anyway ;-)
Seriously though - while I appreciate your parable, you can't compare those. You could have easily scaled up the production line of ROMs: once you're done with designing a platform & the ROM, you only have to make one-per-ROM effort to collect the samples and make the presets (and some of users can confirm, that some samples and the presets are duplicated in different ROMs), and then you can really go and multiply. You can't do the same with hand-made violins, since the time & effort are linear here.
Having said this, I admit it might have been that E-mu never actually reached the level of assumed profitability, so scaling up could not happen.
But there's also another difference: most Stradivari were 300 years old, when E-mu started to produce P2K. They will keep playing for years, if well maintained. Our E-mu boxes won't, they already suffer from jumping dials, broken PSUs and so on. On the other hand, violin is a just a wooden box with a stick and four strings; E-mu instruments are complex mixtures of hardware and software. Most of us, apart from using them in the creative process of making music, treat them like the works of art, and - even though they are deemed to be ephemeral - they certainly deserve it, but let's not get too far ;-)
Bruno