Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

Some thoughts:

It´s like summer sales at woolworth:
- EMU dropped the at first announced prices of the Command Stations 
(3.400 german marks or 1.700 Euros, if my memory serves me right)so 
fast I couldn´t believe it. 
- The same goes with the sound cards
- The latest Promo sales are only adding to the price decay now: Buy 
an XX-7, get a sound card for free (thats worth around 300 Euro I 
guess)
- I didn´t notice anything new coming up at EMU except some 
repackaging of known products. This applies as well to the sound 
library.
- Is it true they haven´t attended the summer namm?

But talking about product innovation: Roland, Yamaha or Korg haven´t 
presented anything new in the hardware workstation field except 
repackaged products. I have the feeling the market seems to be 
saturated with gear and there´s not enough buyers interest to be seen 
at the moment. Except: Can I find it cheaper, used, or on ebay? This 
is not only because of weak summer sales and vacations.

Maybe I´m wrong, but I believe the whole music industry in general is 
suffering from this. It would go along with the development of other 
branches - at least here in germany...

I hope for the best: 
Emu coming up with new products (even if that means our command 
stations will be out of date some day - will they ever? ;-)and
Emu still supporting the XX-7 in the future. Their support on this 
website is why I still stick with the command station, bought two 
soundcards and would go someday for another EMU product, because I 
love the specific EMU sound! I´d be missing this company really if I 
was left to choose between Roland, Yamaha, Korg.

Come on, EMU, tell us you´re alive and kicking!!!

All the best to you.

HEinrich

> But talking about product innovation: Roland, Yamaha or Korg haven\ufffdt
> presented anything new in the hardware workstation field except
> repackaged products. I have the feeling the market seems to be
> saturated with gear and there\ufffds not enough buyers interest to be seen
> at the moment. Except: Can I find it cheaper, used, or on ebay? This
> is not only because of weak summer sales and vacations.

I agree that the major manufacturer's are definately over-flooding the
market with 'new' gear that generally includes misc. and minor 'upgrades' to
the previous "new gear", alot of which never seems to be FULLY finished in
terms of the programming aspect of it (yamaha particularily comes to mind),
before it's dropped all together and they're once again onto the "next" new
thing. I think the entire spawn of the digital analog modeling thing created
a major surge in the market, which the big leaders anticipated would last
longer. However, I think a lot of the alternative companies are actually
starting to pick up a bit in business, the new innovators in the musical
market anyways...companies like Nord, Vermona, Doepfor, JoMoX, MAM,
AS...just to name a few of the better ones.

Not that any of this bothers me, I'm a firm believer in the diversified
effects of variety in musical applications, and I would prefer that some of
the major manufactures take there time for once to design some more advanced
and completely different forms of musical ingenuity...not more 'groove box
this, analog modeling that'.

> I hope for the best:
> Emu coming up with new products (even if that means our command
> stations will be out of date some day - will they ever? ;-)and
> Emu still supporting the XX-7 in the future. Their support on this
> website is why I still stick with the command station, bought two
> soundcards and would go someday for another EMU product, because I
> love the specific EMU sound! I\ufffdd be missing this company really if I
> was left to choose between Roland, Yamaha, Korg.

Word...

Byron