I thought I'd see where we are with the long awaited SynthStation 25 from Akai.
The first site I checked was in the UK. DolphinMusic have the Akai SynthStation listed as being available from the 30th of July. The price quoteed is £79.99
Musician's Friend in the US has the Akai SynthStation25
And lastly Music123 have the Akai SynthStation25
So, which is right? My instinct is that this device still isn't going to see the light of day for some time as yet. It is such a shame as I don't think that their SynthStation app is really going to come into it's own without the hardware to match, and let's face it, we've all been waiting a really long time now.
If you know more, or have had one delivered! Please let me know.
11 comments:
I would definitely leave my money on this if it would somehow work as a MIDI controller for 3rd party devices, that is, to use both the keys and the touch surface as a midi controller too.
SynthStation Forever?
What annoys me is that the dates keep going back from the retail outlets and Akai don't say anything. They certainly don't respond to me anyway.
would of gave me a reason to keep my 1g iphone. I should of known not to put faith in Wakai.
@Mr. A.
good one :D
I got this from Sweetwater today (and edited down a bit):
" ...the Synth Station is now expected to arrive at their warehouse on 8/27 and should start arriving at dealers on 9/3. We will have 40 of these coming in.
So the new date is late August/early September. For a week, Sweetwater posted on their website that the Synthstation 25 was currently being shipped from Akai to them and preorders would be shipped out soon afterwards.
I'm keeping my order open for now and continue to wait.
Why not dreaming about something like that http://musicapps.com.br/?attachment_id=230 ? :)
After I complained a bit to Sweetwater about what I consider to be misleading information on their website, I received the following reply from my sales rep, which I appreciated for its honesty (and again edited a bit for brevity's sake):
"Many brand new products will specifically say that the product hasn't been released yet and that it is a preorder. I'm not sure what it's not that way on
the Synth Station. This is extremely common with brand new products.
They almost never deliver when they expect to and when they tell everyone they will. When I first started, it really upset me. It still makes me unhappy, but after awhile you get used to it.
I think a lot of these manufacturers forget that there are users at the end of the chain. They mostly deal with large companies and they think a $100 product is not a big deal to a multi-million dollar
company who has plenty of other things to sell. For a lot of companies, they're probably right! In our case, we deal one-on-one with every single customer and we are all musicians and consumers. I
certainly know what it's like to be at the end of that chain.
$100 may not be a lot of money to a manufacturer, but it's a nice chunk of money to me and I think very seriously before spending that on a piece of gear. It's not hard at all to put myself into my customers' shoes.
It makes me wish the CEO of AKAI had to personally call every customer and tell them why their product isn't in their hands yet. The company might make some changes after that!
Thanks for that Pierre, I didn't think of Sweetwater.
Sounds like all the distributors are in the same boat.
Marcus, thanks for that link. I'll have to post that pic.
Ah yes good ol' Akai. Communication and honesty are certainly not their strong suit. They won't even admit the MPC 2500 is discontinued, even though every distributor's stock computers show it is. I remember finally finding a MPD24, 8 months after it's supposed official release.
I was rewarded for my patience by them dropping the MPD32 almost immediately afterwards (I'm talking a matter of weeks)
I wanted the Synthstation, but now I have an iPad and could probably do without it. I want to see a universal app version of Synthstation, but with Akai such a simple request is probably akin to wishing it rains gold pieces tomorrow.
i live in nyc and there is a store called "Rock and Soul" that currently has them IN STOCK! the guy told me they are selling like crazy!
here is the link:
http://www.rockandsoul.com/servlet/the-4349/Akai-SynthStation-25--dsh-/Detail
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