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

[pekbro]

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.

Yea I’m just jealous probably… that I’m too cheap for those, or even those angled cables.

[Constructed Identity]

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.

Recently I’ve used my DAW as little more than a multi-track recorder that can extract BPM. Euro rack and now OXI one can be the sequence/timing master but I am not knowledgeable enough in them to just switch and I don’t feel the need to. I started out in 1996 sequencing midi on my Yamaha W7 and only added a computer in 1999.

[vurt]

i started out on tape way back. the very least i would do with a daw, is final recording medium.
tape was a pain in the arse if you need to edit, copy and paste or move stuff around in general.
even on digital recorders with those tiny led sreens, wa a pain to edit audio precisely, could be done, but so much easier when you can make the wav full screen!

[foosnark]

I also started with tape, one of those 4-track Tascam thingies with half-decent mixer capability. It was a pain, and in all the years I had it, I made one track that I liked.

For a bit in the 90s I messed with an awkward combination of Acid Pro with some soundfonts, Sound Forge, and some budget MIDI gear I picked up on YouTube. That opened up possibilities a bit for me, but I was still basically just screwing around.

Fast forward to... 2002 maybe? My brother asked me at Christmas if I'd ever heard of Fruity Loops. That was when everything changed for me.

I like my hardware gear, but I can't picture myself ever wanting to go DAWless. It's easier for me to imagine just going full software modular (...with some controllers) instead. But I don't have any reason to do that either.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Andertons has those 2-XM clones of the Oberheim 2 voice in stock, a good sign that Behringer have started to narrow a gap between product announcements and delivery. I am holding out hope that means that their Jupiter, Juno and Prophet clones will surface before I kick the bucket.

FWIW I’m not interested in the 2-XM but Gear4Music - who aren’t expecting stock for a month - have them listed £50 cheaper.

[Constructed Identity]

My day yesterday…decided what I wanted for the last open space. Something I can’t pronounce :Manis Iteritas Alia so I will be selling the Expert sleepers Pandora to make room. My rack is a hodgepodge of synths not a unified whole and I am fine with that.

[justin3am]

I'm still working through repairing some of these synths from my friend's storage space. This weekend, I was working on the Korg EX-800. This is a paraphonic synth with all 8 voices sharing a single analog low-pass VCF. It's the desktop version of the Korg Poly-800. Fullbucket make a plug-in version called Fury-800 if you want to get an idea of the sound
All I needed to do was replace the battery and reload the factory patches via sysex but since I had it open, I figured it was worth doing the Polybeast mods. That means adding dedicated pots for filter cutoff, resonance, audio input level and Filter modulation amount, as well as switches for 12/24dB filter slopes, choosing which oscillator the audio in is routed through and choosing filter modulation source. I added a data encoder to make it easier to enter parameter values. I also connected the Left output to the audio input's switch pin, so that the output is normalled to the input when nothing is connected (nice for overdriven feedback patches and filter modulation feedback).

With the modifications, the EX-800 is a lot more playable and with the DCO modulating the filter, it can get really gnarly. Adding the resonance control also allows you to increase the range of resonance, into self-oscillation. All mods can be defeated, so the original sound is still there but the thing turns into a crazy sound effect machine with the mods. Lots of fun!

[seafire]

Ordered a few bits I need this week:

QUADATT: Quad passive attenuator (4HP)

AM5: 5-way buffered multiple module (2HP)

Both from York Modular, nice and cheap too.

Manhattan Analog MIX - 4hp Mixer (ebay)

Still waiting for my bARP2600 osc module.

Should be if for a while now...

[WatchTheGuitar]

I'm still working through repairing some of these synths from my friend's storage space. This weekend, I was working on the Korg EX-800. This is a paraphonic synth with all 8 voices sharing a single analog low-pass VCF. It's the desktop version of the Korg Poly-800.

My first band the keyboard player had a Poly-800. It was one of the first synths to open up poly (ish) to skint players, fair bit cheaper than a Juno for instance, yet still give them some sound design options. Not a fan of that “everything is two digits” interface though.

[Constructed Identity]

The Poly -800 is a good example of a bad interface ruining a great synth. Almost bought one a couple years ago, but those buttons… and that awful little screen.

[justin3am]

Yeah! It can sound pretty cool, even without the mods. Adding the encoder to control the Value buttons makes editing a lot easier but it's still a bit like trying to paint a room through the mail slot. The Korg VCF chip has a unique character and the mods add a lot but I will probably sell the EX-800. Still, I've gotten a bunch of sounds that were worth sampling.

[Shabdahbriah]

[...] but it's still a bit like trying to paint a room through the mail slot.

... well said! That perfectly describes how I felt with the DX-7.

[Shabdahbriah]

I also started with tape, one of those 4-track Tascam thingies with half-decent mixer capability.

I started with a Dictaphone in the midish-late 50's. Then a reel to reel in the early 60's. Then in the Mid-80's

TASCAM 388 Studio 8.png

Started editing exclusively ITB in the 90's, when SoundForge came out, as well as moving to portable digital recorders as they proliferated.

[mjolnir]

hehehe this thread is pretty entertaining. we got our own reel live Smithsonian music museum happening over here.
i am feeling this thread. nice...

[foosnark]

we got our own reel live Smithsonian music museum happening over here.

My first synth was a Casio VL-1. To change synth parameters you'd slide the voice selection switch over to "ADSR" and enter a number in calculator style, each digit representing one parameter. You could kind of play it expressively by palm muting the speaker



After that, a Micromoog from a pawn shop was quite a step up. The ribbon controller was dead, and one of the keys was kind of intermittent. Still made nice whooshing and rumbling noises.



Next up was a Hohner Bass 3, which my dad got me spontaneously without having any clue. A piece of junk next to the Moog. Three "presets", all bad.



I really wanted polyphony and a more diverse range of sound, and FM was taking over the world. So my next synth was a DX-100 -- the one you could wear like a keytar, in that cheesy TV commercial with the guy in the motorcycle helmet. Not fun to program but I tried. I also wound up with one of the crap little QY MIDI sequencers and an RX-17 drum machine over the next year or so.



But since at that point I was in the high school jazz ensemble I wanted something with full sized keys and velocity. The Korg DS-8 was still FM (though they couldn't call it that) but with a simpler set of parameters and a just slightly less minimalist interface. It also had a built-in delay that could do chorus/flanging as well as echoes, which was awesome to me because I didn't have any outboard FX at the time.



...and that took me into the 90s. After that it was a few years of cheap crap and not really being inspired by any of it, until I got into DAWs. Thought my hardware days were behind me, until in 2016 when I replaced a dead MIDI controller keyboard with a Minibrute and got pulled in.