| HN Mirror

The history of the synthesiser market seems relevant here. From Bob Johnstone's /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... , pp. 230-231 http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... (or Search Inside for "Keith Emerson"):

> For about ten years, from roughly the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, the small but rapidly growing market for synthesizers was dominated by tiny U.S. start-ups, most notably Moog and ARP (a Massachusetts-based firm best remembered as the maker of the synthesizer used to communicate with the aliens in the movie /Close Encounters of the Third Kind/). People were going apeshit over these funny electronic sounds," Moog recalled.

> "I heard Walter Carlos doing /Switched-On Bach/," rock keyboardist Keith Emerson said, "and on the cover of the album was this thing that looked like a telephone exchange."[11] Fascinated, Emerson made enquiries, and managed to borrow a Moog synthesizer for a live rendition of the theme music from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

> The extraordinary noises the synthesizer made baffled the audience to such an extent that Emerson decided he had to have a Moog synthesizer of his own to play on stage. So the rock star called the inventor and told him what he wanted to do. Moog replied that he would not recommend it—his synthesizers were only meant to be audio equipment.

Nonetheless, Emerson insisted, eventually shelling out £30,000—a princely sum—for a massive, modular system. He was very proud of his new acquisition. "Trouble was it arrived with no instruction book—three oscillators, a reverb unit, trigger controls, filters, mixers, and a load of strange wires and plugs, and I couldn't even switch the damn thing on. You needed to be a rocket scientist."

> Such problems were typical of products made by early U.S. synthesiszer firms, all of which suffered from bad management and chronic underfinancing. "We were always in the red," Moog lamented, "we had no capital. None. Zero." They would stumble along from one National Association of Music Manufacturers show (where instrument dealers gather to place orders) to the next. If you didn't have a hit at one year's show, then you had better have one at the next, or you were dead."

> A second problem was quality. According to Moog, "In the late sixties and early seventies, you could put five pounds of shit in a box, and if it made a sound you could sell it." In addition to poor manufacturing, another recurrent vexation was the inherently unstable nature of these early, analog synthesizers.

> The oscillators that generated the sound were controlled by electrical voltages. To boost an oscillator's pitch up an octave took a corresponding increase in voltage. The trouble was that the damn things wouldn't stay in tune—their pitch was notorious for drifting. A ripple in the power supply, a change in temperature as the hall heated up or as the components themselves became warmer, almost anything was enough to set them adrift, necessitating a retune.

> "The tuning was a nightmare," Emerson recalled, "I had a frequency counter built into my system which I had to keep an eye on, plus I was playing the Hammond and two other instruments. When I look back now, I don't know how I got through it, I really don't."

> An expanding market, undercapitalized firms, poor manufacturing, and unreliable components—this was a scenario that was virtually tailor-made for the Japanese, with their deep pockets, superb production skills, and long-term commitment. Japanese firms began to make their presence felt in the synthesiser market from the mid-seventies on.