Is this the most overpriced thing ever made?

[Don Solaris]

 

The SRX boards. Technically they have 32 mb ram, not 64.

 

 

Actually these boards use companded 8-bit samples and i believe they are advertised as 32MB, not 64MB. If someone told you they are 64MB, he probably tricked you.

 

Most of Roland's and Korg ROMs contain companded data. There's a lot of processing done to restore those samples from 8-bit back to 16-bit, often to "sweet them up" (soundwise), so it's hard to call them 8-bit while on the other hand neither they sound as clear as 16 bit samples. Hence those 32MB are hard to express in some standard units since companding involves dynamical compression and then expansion during re-processing, resulting in 16-bit samples in the end that indeed "occupy" 64MB.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding

[AnotherScott]

 

The SRX boards. Technically they have 32 mb ram

 

 

The SRX boards don't have any RAM. They are ROM.

 

It's not like they're selling off the shelf commoditized RAM, which indeed has gotten much cheaper over the years. A relatively small production run of custom ROMs is going to cost more than an equivalent amount of generic RAM.

 

Also, to a certain extent, the value is in the contents, not the components. You're paying for "the sounds" not just the media. It would be a bit like complaining that Adobe is charging too much for Photoshop because it comes on a 75 cent disk. Though I do think that Roland's "media" probably costs them a decent amount. It's proprietary and probably not high volume.

 

That said, I do think the SRX sounds are pricey... but at least Roland does offer all these extra sounds for a lot of their instruments. Korg and Yamaha have had a few scattered things here and there, but no real comparable library. Though one could argue that Roland should have better sounds in some of their instruments in the first place. ;-)

 

On the flip side, you really have to give credit to Nord for the expanding library of free downloadable high quality sounds for some of their instruments. You do pay a bit of a premium up front, but they continue to give you more and more free sounds.

 

And although Yamaha themselves don't offer much, there is a nice library of third-party sounds for the Motif series, and they're priced pretty well. Though they sometimes offer few actual new waveforms (sometimes none), and unless you have the XF, any new waveforms won't load instantly like Roland ROMs do.

 

So each company takes different approaches. Roland's isn't cheap, but no one else is quite offering the kind of expansion they offer either, particularly for older models.