Still not impressed, rather bewildered by the hype. It seems to me that price obviously means more to people than content.
I don't think the hype is that strange, it's an affordable instrument that gives you a lot of bang for your buck after all. I think it's a shame that you make an assumption that price would mean more to people than content just because you don't like it. Tastes differ after all, and I have a hard time believing that anyone would hold on to one if they didn't like the basic tone of the instrument.
There's basically only one thing I don't like about Uli Behringer in general, and that's his pseudo-altruistic bla-bla and his customer suck-up gestures on forums like GS. Some might perceive it as a super nice guy image, I'd call it bad taste, a lack of decency (especially with regard to his cloning plans), and a reason for vicarious embarrassment. - There are certainly more elegant ways to behave like a prostitute. But that's only what I would describe as an obnoxious business practice, just like the aim to clone every classic there's ever been. Yawn - yet another 808, 909, etc. It's a pure mass market strategy concerning things that are designed for mass consumption, I get it. It's just not very exciting.
As for the DM12: I personally don't care about internal effects, so that side of the instrument could be there or anywhere in my view. It will serve its purpose for the live use, yes, but at the same time you have to be rather careful with especially reverbs in that context, as they can easily turn the sound into mud and be a nightmare for the front of the house mixer. I emphasize the latter because a vast number of sounds that I've heard in the demos are drenched in effects like there's no tomorrow. What I've heard dry on the other side, sounds pretty average, not bad, but also not outstanding. The synth engine in itself is not particularly compelling, rather what you would expect to get at this price point. In fact, the only interesting thing I could find is the various ways in which you can adjust the envelope curves - exponentially, logarithmically, and linear. Okay, that's cool. All the rest looks like an instrument that became more and more crammed over time - in other words: badly designed (at least if you consider the ability to know when to say stop a precondition for well laid-out instruments or tools in general). But what was this synth supposed to hark back to in the first place? A Juno-106. There is already my first question mark, as I simply don't get what is so desirable about the Juno-106 in the first place, except for being a piece of nostalgia for those, who couldn't afford anything better back in the day. So basically the whole concept of the DM12 is bewildering to me from the get-go.
As for price over content: I'm not sitting on a high horse when it comes to affordable instruments. There are lots of great affordable instruments, many of which have been released over the past couple of years: from the MiniBrute to the Volcas and beyond. I get the impression though, that the price of the DM12 becomes a sort of knockout argument in most reviews, as if it was a means to an end already. And to me this seems to be the only true piece of innovation there is about this synth. While that may be exciting or interesting from an economical perspective, I fail to see what's so exciting about the DM12 in terms of synthesis though - especially since a Prophet '08 can still run circles around it.
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