Moog and inMusic announcement

The Lounge Other Gear
#21

This feels similar to Sequential joining Focusrite.

With product development continuing to be led by Steve Dunnington, a long-time Moog engineer and former student of Bob Moog, we are proud to keep engineering, designing, and building instruments in our hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, USA.

This makes it seem like business as usual. They could just be offloading things like customer support, sourcing parts, etc, and utilizing InMusic’s shipping and distribution network.

Or maybe they keep building legacy instruments in Asheville, and there will be some newer models being built elsewhere.

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#22

They really need help on the support and QC side and I hope they get it. The minimoog reissue launch has been a huge disaster if the GS thread is any indication.

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#23

Very sad to hear that Moog, one of the most important pioneers, who created and shaped what we call synthesizer, a employees owned company, will no longer be an independet enterprise.

It’s a little like to say good bye to Bob Moog’s spirit a second time.

Good luck to Moog and all the good people, who have contributed to this unique company giving us inspiring instruments we love and adore.

And I hope that some of the Moog spirit will persist.

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#24

I’ve seen quite a few Akai users say some less than nice things about inMusic.

Don’t know if that means anything, though…

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#25

Yeah, I was talking to someone at a shop recently, and they echoed the same thing, that they were having QC issues on the Minimoog and getting a lot of returns. I’ve also read a lot of complaints about Moog’s support in recent years.

I watched an interview recently with someone at Moog, and they talked about how much Moog has scaled up in recent years, and how many employees they have hired due to the success of their semi-modular synths. It’s possible that the speed at which they have had to scale up has affected their QC.

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InMusic (Akai etc.) buys Moog
#26

In the movies, the feds always use the people you trust the most to gain your trust and infiltrate your crew.

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#27

If true this creates high cost and kills profit.

Off topic, but my experience. Even other revered US manufacturers had quality issues for years. Bought a brand new Voyager - came out of the box with an issue and had to go back, same goes for Oberheim, and Dave Smith. All of my Korg, Yamaha, and Roland gear had never issues (knock on wood) - even gear made in the 80ies.

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#28

Moog Music Is An Employee- Corporate-Owned Company

I don’t love this news, but I guess it’s not shocking. Moog is a mid-sized company, and it’s hard in this economy to be in the middle: indie Eurorack/modular companies can take more risks and make quirkier products, while giants like Yamaha and Behringer can move faster and build more.

Hopefully Moog’s prior history of corporate mismanagement can serve as a warning to the new partners. Best-case scenario, we get new Moog synths and modular units. Worst-case…well, I already have my Mother semi-modular family, and they can’t take that away from me.

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#29

Kinda wish I’d bought the DFAM+SubH when they were on sale earlier this year. I’ll be very surprised if they run the sale again next year, following this news.

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#30

See if you can get some data on whether the merger (or whatever) becomes official immediately or after the end of the fiscal year. If this has taken effect as of the announcement, you may be surprised to see your money begin to stretch a little farther around Q4 as they do some house cleaning.

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#31

I don’t see how Moog could have survived without being bought or completely changing how they did business and the category of products they sold,

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#32

prob easy from a consumer perspective, but not a huge fan of how it went with Alesis Rane and Akai after the take-over by these buds… (also biased as someone who owns an A6 and grew up on an MPC2KXL)

time will tell…

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#33

I can finally get a Moog synth is gold or red with 4gb of ram and a touchscreen.

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#34

Totally agree with this statement. When I saw the new Modulars come out I felt they were marketing towards people that were very well off and not actually making music as a passion or living.
I obviously don’t really know what they were thinking but how many working musicians can drop 10-50k when so many other options exist.
I also feel like the Moog One is a marvel of sound and options (albeit the buggy firmware fiasco) but again, 6-8K… Even if I had that kind of money I wouldn’t spend it all in one place/one synth.

I truly hope this “partnership” might yield a solid, modern, 6+ voice poly for under $3k, but I won’t hold my breath.

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#35

without going into too much detail, i’ve had enough severe qc issues with moog’s instruments that it seemed like they might be in trouble

judging from the retailer i dealt with (who was very cool) concerning some of these problems, it also seemed like i wasn’t the only one having them

no one likes to see a corporate buyout like this (although no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway etc) but hopefully moog gets the support they need to produce quality stuff

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#36

And even if they do, it will have to stand well apart of the sequential sixes while being $500 cheaper. That’s going to be tough, unless they build them somewhere else.

#37

I’m ready

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#38

I’ve been saying for years that they need to do a synth with a voice structure (and count) similar to the Juno series, or Polysix. but with the oscillator and filter from the Grandmother. the One is awesome, but it’s also just too much synth, and has no real character (to me). shooting for somewhere between that and a monosynth would be absolute gold I think.

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#39

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$199

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#40

Corporate finance is one of those things where if you have little knowledge it is very easy to make bad decisions. When you gain a moderate amount of knowledge, you generally prefer that specialized experts handle the details. If you are a specialized expert, it still pays to be extremely careful about what you get involved in.

As far as I can tell, employee ownership makes sense in a very narrow range of companies: those that have a fairly simple playbook for rapid growth and have a management team committed to executing that playbook. It doesn’t make sense for stable companies, slow growth companies or fast growth companies that have a limited potential market. I do know that even if your grandmother is Éliane Radigue she is unlikely to ever want a Grandmother.

I’m happy that Moog has found a way to continue to exist, although there are some big questions about what that actually means when part of the inMusic group, considering their track record.

1 Like