I do wonder if there is a cut off point for manufacturers as well. For example if prices go so far out of control that something like the Take 5 can only end up being $3500 and everything else in the catalog is $5000-10,000 or even worse if most synth were around the $10,000 mark would companies even bother putting out a product or investing the time to produce something that most of their customer base can't afford? I suppose they could go back to their 80's mindset of just making a small batch of $10,000 instruments for a select few who could afford it but even then what's the longevity of something like that? How many $25,000 Fairlight CMIs sold? How many $200,000 Synclavier or Audioframe Waveframe systems were sold? And that's when being a musician or having a music studio was a fruitful venture. Now?
This is where we are going to see companies like Sequential, Moog and others go belly up again and only Roland and Yamaha and maybe Korg and Behringer will dominate the market and more and more people will switch over to VSTs because let's be real, even if the cost of manufacturing goes down and the world's issues settle down....companies aren't going to give a shit. They aren't going to suddenly lower the price of their instruments back down.
We experience this a lot in Canada. Even when our dollar was on par or higher than the US dollar, music stores refused to lower their pricing so more and more people just ended up ordering directly from the states.
Sequential won't go belly up now that they're owned by Focusrite, due to eggs in multiple baskets and such that goes with having a parent company. When the acquisition was announced, I posted a thought that perhaps parts shortages played a partial role in Dave's decision... that, plus, he's 72 now I think, and while he might be interested in designing synths another 10 years or so I'm sure he doesn't want to work forever.
I can also envision the possibility of this chip shortage situation impacting what we've been enjoying over the last few years as a sort of a second golden age of analog, perhaps putting hardware out of reach of many buyers.
When I say Belly Up I’m referring to outputting a product. Sequential could easily just become something Focusrite owns but doesn’t use at all....ala Gibson owning Oberheim or Yamaha owning Sequential.
That could happen to any acquired company at any time I suppose, but I think the circumstances that led to that back in the 80's are much different now. At the time, synthesizers were so new that the differences between analog and digital were not fully understood by musicians. When the DX7 emerged and was followed by the likes of the D50, buyers mistook "different" for "better", and assumed that because digital synths stayed in tune and were more reliable, that they were the way of the future. There was this conventional wisdom floating around that the definition of a "good" synth was how well it can sound like an acoustic instrument, so technologies like sampling appeared vastly superior to analog synthesis on the surface... this and other factors gave analog a black eye, and combined with other factors was a big reason for the analog extinction effect.
Times have changed now though.. like all of the ebb and flow over the history of synths, I don't think there is any single factor that is at play, but one major factor is that more powerful computers+DAWs+software synths+youtube tutorials has led to a bumper crop of bedroom studio musicians who are much more knowledgeable about music production in general and instruments specifics like the difference between analog and digital. Many kids these days grow up on soft synths and later start graduating toward hardware, and specifically seek out analog to get a sound that's elusive in software. Many of them weren't even born yet during the original days of the original Prophet 5, Minimoog etc, yet they can hear the difference and want that sound.
I don't have a crystal ball of course... for all I know we could all be headed toward World War 3 where most manufacturing efforts shift to weapon systems and analog synths become a forgotten art once again. But I definitely don't think the same events will play out the same as before.
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