BROTHER the typewriter company stopped making sequencers?

[slovak]

tell me why BROTHER the typewriter company never kept going in the sequencer business-they were a different approach to the music making utilities...

[soma]

Link please. I love differnt approaches

This is all I found: http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/brother_pdc100pro.cfm
They are on sale for around $35

[xander]

A LOOOONG time ago, Singer made a 2.5 inch diskette. For some reason known only to the demi-gods of Centauri Prime, Akai decided to use these diskettes in their samplers. I had an Akai S612 -- a pretty decent sampler for it's day (took up 5 rack spaces). I used to have to go to the Singer Sewing Centre in me neighbourhood to get extra diskettes.

[chardin]

What's a typewriter? What's a sewing machine?

[Angus_FX]

They were a lot cheaper, mechanically etc., than 3.5" diskettes. Some Amstrad computers (CPC-series wordprocessors) used a similar 3-inch hardshell diskette.

Roland had some gear that used those QuickDisks as well. Certainly a sequencer (P-100?), not sure what else.

Bear in mind that when tapes ruled the roost in the early-mid 80s, floppy disk drives cost several hundred dollars apiece.. I think my father paid something like GBP800 ($1200 or so) for a twin 5.25inch single-density (100kb per disk) drive unit for a BBC Micro. So there was plenty of room for cheaper, inferior hardware like QuickDisks and Amstrad 3" disks to exist alongside the standard 3.5inch floppy.

[invitia]

The fantastic 2 track (but with full 16 MIDI channels capacity using MIDI mergin and with around 15000 note capacity) Korg SQD-1 sequencer also used Quick-disks (I paid around 650 US dollars for it back in 1986). The so called Quickdisks were really slow, I remember once the SQD-1 decided to crash during one of our shows and just to reload the sequencer took many minutes. We quickly run out of stories to tell to the audience while we waited for the data to load again.

[Tux]

I had a Korg SQD8, which I've been chatting about in another thread. That too used 2.8' Quick disks. Load of rubbish they were with their 'write once - read many' type format and ultra low capacity...

I remember that Brother sequencer. Sound on sound actually reviewed it (I have a copy of it somewhere in my extensive archive!)

Anyone remember the sequencer brought out by Seiko (yes the watch company) circa 1991?

[Toonyfish]

Roland had some gear that used those QuickDisks as well. Certainly a sequencer (P-100?), not sure what else.

Roland S10 sampling keyboard used those as well as the Akai X7000 sampling keyboard. I used to own the Akai and my high school music room had the Roland.


Toonyfish

[Bruce Bartlett]

Also the rackmount equivalent to the S-10, (S-110?) and one which had a few more features (S-220, IIRC).

And yeah, Quikdisks sucked hard, even for the time. All the fragility of 5.25 disks (they needed protective sleeves), and pitiful storage capacity and speed.

[donkey tugger]

tell me why BROTHER the typewriter company never kept going in the sequencer business

I think it coincided with about the time they stopped sponsoring Man City...had enough of lost causes?

[dougsyo]

I had a Brother MDI-30. I paid $40 for it on EBay. It was adequate, and it used more-or-less standard floppies (720K 3.5"), but it used a non-standard disk format so you could only get songs into and out of it via MIDI.

As the church had a Yamaha PSR-550 and I got myself a Yamaha PSR-2000 (both with standard DOS-compatible 3.5" floppy) it outgrew its usefulness to me. I sold it for what I paid for it on EBay a year or two after I got it. I think if it had used standard disk format, I'd have kept it.

http://www.synthony.com/vintage/brother.html

Doug