Behringer: *LOTS* of classic analogue clones in the works ....

[EvilDragon]

They aren't attending NAMM anymore.


(Who's doing EMS clones?)

[Daags]

it was a really, really, really, really, really stupid one with no material gains and potentially giving a healthy heads up to your most likely legal adversaries.

Or, just perhaps, telling people "Don't buy Roland Boutique anything for x-mas, don't buy Korg MS-20/Odyssey/2600 or any of the upcoming EMS clones - wait till NAMM and get two for the price of one from us"

How can it possibly say that when with the Model D clone we've seen exactly how long it takes to get from actual announcements and actual photos and actual prototypes to widespread availability.

If what you're suggesting was their evil genius goal behind this, then the best way to achieve that would be absolute and unadulterated focus on the D SYNTH and getting it into people's hands.

If this is intentional, what they're actually saying is 'look how it played out with the D SYNTH ... buy whatever you like this xmas cos it's gonna be a while' .... and that was without Moog having a heads up. Imagine the hold ups Roland and Korg could cause by Behringer explicitly telegraphing their intentions to clone their designs, and even specifying the design.

[JCJR]

I hadn't paid much attention to the deepmind 12 for awhile, just watched a couple of videos a year or so ago. Last night listened to several detailed sound demos. Assuming it is "durable goods" that won't fry or fall apart in a year or two. I have no idea one way or the other. Some behringer stuff is built real durable and some not. Not just a behringer thang-- For instance odyssey vs octave cat-- Very similar synths. In my experience a daily-used Cat tended to start falling apart after a couple of years but my old white face Odyssey was basically perfect 20 years after manufacture, except it would have benefitted from all new sliders by then and the Pratt&Reed gold-plated j-wire keyboard contacts were a bad idea from day 1. They just didn't know any better back then.

its hard to know what to make of it. From one point of view maybe deepmind 12 itself would make it kinda silly to consider buying something like a king korg instead.

I mean, if I had a deepmind 12 I could probably program the same types of analog sounds I usually make regardless of what axe I'm using. Maybe I have a fossilized too-narrow concept of how a good analog synth pallette should be. In sound demos I hear snatches of "oh yeah, sounds like it can probably nail that favorite class of sound with some tweaking". But then the demo video typically goes on to play several patches perhaps of academic sound design interest but dang if I'd easily figure out how to use the sound in a song. I mean, sure its complex with lots of twitters and shifty stuff but does not sound all that interesting or pleasant even one time thru. Much less "immortalize" the patch by using it somewhere in a song, and have to endure those silly twitters every time you play the song.

Just sayin, the only two "accurate clones" guaranteed to get my money if the price was right would be Chroma Polaris and Obie Matrix 12. Give me a choice between a perfect-condition CS80 and a perfect-condition Chroma Polaris, I'll take the polaris thank you. Same trade-off choice between an old prophet 5 or memorymoog or whatever. Those were all good old synths but I already either had one, or played em enough not to be interested any more.

Same basic equation trading off most old nostalgia synths against Matrix 12. Maybe there are cases I'm not considering, but matrix 12 would win the preference war near every time.

A real trainwreck deciding between a polaris vs a matrix 12. They were entirely different beasts, hard to compare one against the other.

But this business of what potentially should be cloned is possibly an ill-formed question with no sensible answer. Dunno.

Just wild guessing here-- It is quite possible I could sit down with any of the nice modern analog polysynths including deepmind 12 and figure out how to get sounds "near identical" to the polaris. I guess it was "falling off the log easy" to get certain classes of sound out of the polaris, but most likely could be 99.9 percent duplicated with many modern analog or virtual analog instruments.

The Matrix 12 made other classes of sound "falling off the log easy" and maybe there are fewer modern poly synths with enough cross-mod capabilities to do some of those tricks. But possibly most of Matrix 12 could be 99.9 percent duplicated on modern-design poly synths (though perhaps have to go to more trouble to accomplish it). OTOH, maybe some of the modern ones would make it EASIER to nail some of those sounds.

Just wondering about the ultimate futility of duplicating something old regardless how much fun. In theory a complex-enough modern instrument ought to get "close enough to rock'n'roll" to all those old synths, except the ones that were so flawed/broken in design, that you would have to make an intentionally screwed-up synth to duplicate the results.

[c0nan]

it was a really, really, really, really, really stupid one with no material gains and potentially giving a healthy heads up to your most likely legal adversaries.

Or, just perhaps, telling people "Don't buy Roland Boutique anything for x-mas, don't buy Korg MS-20/Odyssey/2600 or any of the upcoming EMS clones - wait till NAMM and get two for the price of one from us"

Could make sense if they were near production-status, but they aren´t. No point in making people not buy anything at NAMM because they release a ~500€ synth next christmas imho.
And why is everybody referring to the Moog clone? It was announced for the end of the year anyway, wasn´t it?

Anyway, I hope they were serious about this FX-Unit/Interface. That looked interesting. And the Linn oc

[Urs]

They aren't attending NAMM anymore.

I'm not saying that I know what Behringer's intentions were or weren't. I just don't buy "website glitch" and I also don't buy into some mystical marketing strategy where 20 similar products with highly similar target group are being worked on simultaneously. This makes absolutely no sense. Release 20 products that cannibalise themselves? I don't buy it.

(Who's doing EMS clones?)

Various, e.g. http://www.thesynthi.de

[rod_zero]

I would also like a Poly oberheim clone more than anything, the roland sound is well covered and well as the prophet.

There is also a lack of a big knoby VCO poly with good modulation possibilities. The modals are way to expensive, the OB6 and P05 are very limited.

[Urs]

I would also like a Poly oberheim clone more than anything, the roland sound is well covered and well as the prophet.

There is also a lack of a big knoby VCO poly with good modulation possibilities. The modals are way to expensive, the OB6 and P05 are very limited.

Well, that's the thing. Behringer has been granted some "OB-Xa" trademark, as well as "OSCar" and a few others, yet what these trademarks suggest wasn't in yesterday's "glitch".

It's all a bit nuts IMHO.

[NEOREV]

Well, well, well...
WASP DELUXE trademarked by Behringer's MUSIC Group IP Ltd.



Scroll down to the Wasp logo in this link for more info...
http://www.matrixsynth.com/2017/12/behr ... i.html?m=1

Behringer's other trademarks...
OBERHEIM
OB-XA
OSCAR
FOUNTAIN
PIPELINE
WASP
WASP DELUXE

[breakmixer]

I would also like a Poly oberheim clone more than anything, the roland sound is well covered and well as the prophet.

There is also a lack of a big knoby VCO poly with good modulation possibilities. The modals are way to expensive, the OB6 and P05 are very limited.

Well, that's the thing. Behringer has been granted some "OB-Xa" trademark, as well as "OSCar" and a few others, yet what these trademarks suggest wasn't in yesterday's "glitch".

It's all a bit nuts IMHO.

Housing developers and supermarkets buy up land so no one else can build on it/create a competing supermarket.

[fluffy_little_something]

Are those old synths not somehow protected or can anyone simply make clones of them? Would be odd when even a mere color such as IBM's blue tone is protected and an entire synth isn't

[JCJR]

Are those old synths not somehow protected or can anyone simply make clones of them? Would be odd when even a mere color such as IBM's blue tone is protected and an entire synth isn't

I am not a lawyer nor pretend to know, and law varies according to geography. Unless there is something "very unique" and patented about a circuit, so far as I know the circuit can't be protected. At least in USA. And most circuits are not unique enough to qualify.

Now there is a patent subset called a design patent, which tends to be rather specific. You could probably get a design patent on a circuit, as you could get a design patent on a ketchup bottle or a certain air filter for a particular car model. But those at best would prevent a 100 percent clone of the design. Change a few parts in a circuit, possibly even making an improved version in the process, and its not the same circuit design any more. Change the shape of the air filter or ketchup bottle, its still an air filter or ketchup bottle, but not protected by the design patent.

You could copyright the paper or digital image of the engineer's drawing of the circuit. So all you have to do is draw the exact same circuit in another fashion on the page or digital image file, and you kept the circuit but worked around the copyright on the circuit drawing.

You can copyright a printed circuit board layout, possibly preventing a direct clone of the circuit board., But there are typically zillions of ways to lay out a circuit board that will all basically work about the same, so if you design yer own PC layout for the same circuit and its different from the copyrighted PC layout, then the PC board copyright doesn't matter.

Same deal, copyright or design patent panel layouts or other look'n'feel aspects of a product. A different panel layout breaks that kind of copyright or design patent.

Many keyboards contain software/firmware to make the thang run. You can copyright the firmware. But just draw up a list of specs of what the firmware has to do, hire a programmer to write a program to fulfill the specs (without ever letting the programmer see any details of the original code). Clean room technique. There are so many ways to skin the cat, your version of the firmware will probably work the same if not better, and odds are slim that two programmers would have come up with code close enough that one could be considered a copy of the other.

Maybe as you say, some kind of trademark protection (and lots of money to pay all the lawyers) would be the best one could do. I'm even more ignorant of trademark than patent and copyright.

It may come down to how much money you can stand to waste on lawyer bills. If a deep pocket company wants to make a shoestring company miserable, the big company doesn't even need defensible charges. All he has to do is drag the little guy into court and force the little guy into bankruptcy paying lawyers, and then it doesn't matter that the judge finally throws out the original frivolous lawsuit. You succeeded in killing the competition anyway.

If a company has deep enough pockets, just the threat of a lawsuit will chase off a little fish, because the little fish can't afford the lawyer fees regardless who is right or wrong.

[SLiC]

Are those old synths not somehow protected or can anyone simply make clones of them? Would be odd when even a mere color such as IBM's blue tone is protected and an entire synth isn't

And yet the IBM PC was famously cloned and so began the era of the PC!

Superb Netflix series on this ‘halt and catch fire’

[AnX]

I would also like a Poly oberheim clone more than anything, the roland sound is well covered and well as the prophet.

There is also a lack of a big knoby VCO poly with good modulation possibilities. The modals are way to expensive, the OB6 and P05 are very limited.

Well, that's the thing. Behringer has been granted some "OB-Xa" trademark, as well as "OSCar" and a few others, yet what these trademarks suggest wasn't in yesterday's "glitch".

It's all a bit nuts IMHO.

Housing developers and supermarkets buy up land so no one else can build on it/create a competing supermarket.

Exactly...and they are c**ts for doing so (especially tesco )

[Urs]

Housing developers and supermarkets buy up land so no one else can build on it/create a competing supermarket.

Sure, but trademarks need to be used to be valid. If you have a trademark and you don't put out a product or service whatsoever covering the classification of that trademark, or if you can't prove intent to do so, it is null and void.

[Vectorman]

Behringer doing classic synths, is like me scoring the Star Wars franchise.

Congrats !

I passed on it. It didn't fit with my yoga class schedule.

Gotta keep your "zen thing" going, man.