Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.
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In someways this isn’t that unlike the past.
I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London.
That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time.
Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
FYI the current run of Korg PS-3300 sold out in minutes even at £11,000.
Unbelievable. I guess because of a lot of bored software people rather than trained musicians.
Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices.
The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
I want to say I agree, but since this is 50 year old tech, wouldn't there be newer mass produced products that do the same thing at a fraction of the price? Even if purely analog it would benefit from economies of scale, miniaturization, etc.
I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge:
Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips.
There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply.
But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity.
So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
> entirely new capabilities are unlocked
But unfortunately, it will primarily be used by rich YouTube "creators" to recreate some old Jean-Michel Jarre tracks.
The 'current'? They sell out since Korg started this convoluted order "process", wbich isn't even one, since you hear conflicting things in different countries from the 'distributors".
The price of a new Yamaha GX-1 in 1975 was around $60,000, or about $385,000 in today's money.