2025: A Year in Gear (What You've Bought or Want to Buy in 2025)

[mjolnir]

This pretty much sums me up.
The specificity of the gear is almost negligeable.
It's the concept of DAWless which has me.



I'm intimately involved with my laptop system and together we have a deep history.
Then why can't I quit looking at those DAWless setups passing me by?
Do you feel my perspective on this?

[WatchTheGuitar]

-ish. I don’t long to be DAWless though, I initially was only interested in having hardware sequencing to use with soft synths and maybe one or two analog synths. This opened up a costly (yet fun) path leading to buying a bunch more synths and shitloads of modular but even now I still rely on a DAW for recording and most of my effects processing plus integration with plugins like VCV that offer really complex generative sequencing and modulation that can cover what a raft of expensive eurorack modules do at far less cost.

[justin3am]

The idea of 'Going DAWless' is a little weird to me. I love working with hardware but there are lots of things that I prefer doing in a DAW. What is it about recording without a DAW that appeals to you?
When making music, I just want to stay in the flow. When I'm working with hardware, there are a lot of things that can happen that might take me out of the flow. Now, I try make sure that gear is never an obstacle to getting things done. It's taken a lot of trial and error to get there and in the process I've found that I'm pretty adept at capturing decent recordings with just whatever I have on hand. That's been much more valuable to me than finding one perfect studio setup.

[seafire]

Another frame turned up today for the bottom of my euro case. The Surges filter and 150 module turned up too. Filter is really nice.

Should be getting more cables and splitters at weekend.

What I need now is a 3 or pref 4 channel mixer, so I can route more than one sound source into a filter. I can use stackable, but I prefer to have an attenuator for each input.

Prob get the 173 gates/multiples soon too.

I ordered the 2600 osc module, hopefully here by end of month.

[mjolnir]

As per going DAWless, it probably comes from where I started. I started out my music experiences with hardware around 1988. I didn't really have a computer based setup until around 2007. I still find that certain kinds of effects are hard to do in the computer and the internet and sys admin part of computing gets me down from time to time. Also, compatibility issues bite me in software. In hardware, if it turns on, it's ready to go. Compatibility is all in the cables, and that's easy.

Also, staring at a screen is counterproductive for me in audio. I grew up listening to the composition, and memorizing everything. Relying on the monitor screen for my brain is a distraction that I'm still not used to after all these years.

I'm thinking, if I combine some hardware and some software, I think i'll have the best of both worlds. There's certain features I can only get from hardware, but i don't want to spill the beans on all that because I still have purchase plans in a fickle market era.

Overall, my brain just works differently with hardware and I feel like I could get back to my roots and really start pushing out better material.
It's taken me a very long time to come to this conclusion, but I feel it's true. I might even get into electronics again and make some of my own instrument parts.

[cryophonik]

I started with hardware synths in the early 80s when my main setup was an old Roland sequencer and a couple of synths and I loved it at the time. In the early 2000s, I started my home studio with a Korg digital multitrack recorder with pretty comprehensive MIDI sequencing abilities (can’t recall the model offhand) for my hardware synths, but the small screen and menu diving made the workflow a nightmare, so it wasn’t long before I decided to switch to a DAW. More recently, I’ve experimented with DAWless setups by connecting my Elektrons to other synths and sequencing some rough some ideas, but quickly realized that it’s not for me. I’m too acclimated to a DAW interface and workflow to go back now, but I can certainly still see the appeal.

[elxsound]

I technically could work Dawless with the 1010music BlueBox (both desktop & eurorack), but I feel it would be a forced limitation that has its own drawbacks. My preference is recording hardware and bringing it back into Live. I also have Push 3, which is a DAW squished into hardware.

Truly, nothing is perfect. There’s always going to be something to see as a flaw that requires a solution, but in the end maybe the first way was the best. Who really knows. We’re all different, so maybe you need a DAWless setup?

Back on topic: https://myvolts.com/Halo
I ordered a couple of these Halo cables. There have been several times I wished I had these for a quick signal test.

[cryophonik]

I guess I sorta go DAWless with my Maschine+, but I see it as essentially a hardware DAW and I basically just use it to sketch out basic ideas that I recreate in my DAW (I don’t like using the Maschine software to complete songs).

[elxsound]

I guess I sorta go DAWless with my Maschine+, but I see it as essentially a hardware DAW and I basically just use it to sketch out basic ideas that I recreate in my DAW (I don’t like using the Maschine software to complete songs).

Same feeling about Push 3. I like it as a starting point, but to finish something in Push 3 feels unnecessarily tedious, especially since I can’t render out. I could resample an output but all that routing configuration is more than I’d like to mess with if I don’t need to.

[justin3am]

Truly, nothing is perfect. There’s always going to be something to see as a flaw that requires a solution, but in the end maybe the first way was the best. Who really knows. We’re all different, so maybe you need a DAWless setup?

Yeah, this is my feeling exactly! Even when you try to get a good balance of different technologies based on their strengths, the process is never perfect. Still it can be fun and inspiring to work with a different set of tools.

Back on topic: https://myvolts.com/Halo
I ordered a couple of these Halo cables. There have been several times I wished I had these for a quick signal test.

Those look cool. More subtle than other LED cables I've seen. Surely a nice utility for testing signal flow.

[Shabdahbriah]

Back on topic: https://myvolts.com/Halo
I ordered a couple of these Halo cables. There have been several times I wished I had these for a quick signal test.

Those look cool. More subtle than other LED cables I've seen. Surely a nice utility for testing signal flow.

They do indeed. Do take this into consideration, however:

Do LED patch cables work in the same way as regular patch cables?
Halo cables are in a family of accessories which include all the other LED cables, along with those little LED patch plug-ins that give you a visual on a signal. All these items draw current and as a result become an unexpected addition to the electrical and electronic system which they are plugged into, i.e. your module.
As these LED products are new to the market, module designers could not have expected you to plug this sort of patch cable into their module, nor would they have tested to see how it effects it's operation.
A number of our more experienced testers have pointed this out to us and identified examples of ways these could create irregular behaviour.
The good news is that none of these will be damaging to you, or your equipment. The bad news is that you may have to replace the halo cable with a standard patch cable.
Probably the most common example of this is when using certain cycling outputs, where drawing voltage from a jack to power an LED results in the cycle being stalled. (We have tested this with other modular LED indicator products and it happens with all of them, not just ours!) So far we've noticed this behavior on three modules:

Make Noise Maths (unity output only)
Erica Synths Black Dual ASR EG
Buchla Tiptop 281t (Non-operational with LED patch cables)

However, having tested Halos with more than 20 other cycling function generators, we don't believe the problem to be widespread.

[D-Fusion]

Bought the Behringer MS-1 MK II and the Grind a few weeks ago.

[elxsound]

Back on topic: https://myvolts.com/Halo
I ordered a couple of these Halo cables. There have been several times I wished I had these for a quick signal test.

Those look cool. More subtle than other LED cables I've seen. Surely a nice utility for testing signal flow.

They do indeed. Do take this into consideration, however:

Do LED patch cables work in the same way as regular patch cables?
Halo cables are in a family of accessories which include all the other LED cables, along with those little LED patch plug-ins that give you a visual on a signal. All these items draw current and as a result become an unexpected addition to the electrical and electronic system which they are plugged into, i.e. your module.
As these LED products are new to the market, module designers could not have expected you to plug this sort of patch cable into their module, nor would they have tested to see how it effects it's operation.
A number of our more experienced testers have pointed this out to us and identified examples of ways these could create irregular behaviour.
The good news is that none of these will be damaging to you, or your equipment. The bad news is that you may have to replace the halo cable with a standard patch cable.
Probably the most common example of this is when using certain cycling outputs, where drawing voltage from a jack to power an LED results in the cycle being stalled. (We have tested this with other modular LED indicator products and it happens with all of them, not just ours!) So far we've noticed this behavior on three modules:

Make Noise Maths (unity output only)
Erica Synths Black Dual ASR EG
Buchla Tiptop 281t (Non-operational with LED patch cables)

However, having tested Halos with more than 20 other cycling function generators, we don't believe the problem to be widespread.

Very interesting! As a Maths user, that is concerning.

On the plus side I only wanted them for occasional quick testing/problem solving, but no plans to keep them in. I read about some of the other LED cables where people reported reduced CV output, more noticeable on pitch. I just assumed these would be similar.

[pekbro]

Weird, fortunately I would never waste money on such fancy cables.

[elxsound]

Weird, fortunately I would never waste money on such fancy cables.

The two cables I bought with a 20% discount, were cheaper than a trio of tacos. No joke. Things were already expensive here and they keep going up!

But, sill I can acknowledge it is a luxury purpose but saves me some time here and there with quick visual feedback.