Benn giving away 200 dollar discounts lol. Man makes great content, but his relationship with polyend at the moment is quite damaging to his credibility.
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One has to wonder… If they really had to price it at 800 at launch because of chip shortages and whatnot then for how long have they pocketed the 40% they’ve shaven off the price now?
That is wild, what a mess. What is Benn tanking his reputation for??
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He’s probably friends with polyend people. Ppl tend to think a bit biased when it’s about your friend.
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Found it on backstage btw
Wow…I guess it does “PAY” to Play these days.
Man, now the $700 investment I made less than 2 years ago is worthless.
How lame is this. This isn’t an upgrade…this is misguided roadmap management…imho
Building things just to build them. Last years cup holder was for a Liter cup, now this years model is for 2 Liters…send us your old cup holder model cause we didn’t realize this was important when we made the .5 Liter cup holder…
It seems like there should be some sort of marketing/product accountability at PE…to insure a proper hardware roadmap for them…because in the last 4 years they’ve released 2 of the mostly exact same products cause they finally realized the “dream” product they wanted…
So weird to see this sort of management of hardware vision unfold before us…in this way, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised…we had the Perq, then the SEQ, then the Medusa, then the OG Tracker…now the Play…well, I’m done being played…no more money from me to them…
Is there some sort of ID School/Post Grad Eng after school program associated with Polyend where they can’t see what’s going on here?
I’m starting to think their products are just half baked ideas that aren’t a complete thought when thinking about the LEGACY of a product line…
Also, before anyone gives me beef about what I am saying, I’ve payed my dues in the nature of the OG Tracker, and now OG Play…so I have some perspective on what I am saying/thinking/opining… 
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Normally I enjoy Benn’s content, but this video left a foul taste in my mouth.
He felt generally pretty snarky about the whole thing, especially exclaiming that he didn’t want to beta test audio interfaces for the sake of testing play+ interactivity. WTF does he think Beta testing is, that’s your main job as a beta tester!
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I do wish companies would provide upgrade paths.
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What’s really ass-backwards about this whole thing is that both the Tracker and Play supposedly embrace their limitations. The design seems/seemed very intentional. You think to yourself: of course they must have thought about adding synths to the Play, but it must have been intentional, a design philosophy. And then this happens?
People bitch at Elektron for “intentionally throttling features” on their boxes so you buy multiple of them. This is kind of a conspiracy IMO but even if it’s true at least they don’t coerce you into buying essentially same product twice in a 2-year period. Digitakt is from 2017 and running strong.
I would really love to read or hear some clarification from them as to why we have arrived at this situation. To my eyes it’s either greed or incompetency.
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That whole part of the message was pure BS…USB Class compliant Audio Interfaces work just fine with the MPC line and iPadOS…I should know as I live in this workflow daily and have tried 5+ interfaces with my setup.
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Yeah upgrade paths could be cool. The way they did it here is ridiculous. I don’t see how swapping the board out could cost $400. They should charge existing customers the cost of the board and maybe some more for labor but that doesn’t total out to be $400. Instead their solution is to swap out the whole unit and charge people half cost?
Synthstrom upgraded to the OLED screen and they charged people for the screen. That’s how it should be done especially when the rest of the hardware remains the same.
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My thoughts exactly. And all the scrolling needed to edit the patches… am I understanding correctly that you can only have 3 different synth patches per project and it’s not even possible to smoothly tweak synth parameters when playing? I hope it’s at least possible to resample synths, because with such limitations they really only seems useful as a sampler sound source.
Anyway, this makes me definitely not want to by PTM until new improved version comes out… hopefully it will also get these synth engines (and have QC issues resolved).
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Fwiw, i just came to the realization that PE is probably a Hardware first company and Software tertiary at best.
If they were unified in their thinking about products there hardware would be future proof for about 3-5 generations of their software, but as it stands their hardware is only good for maybe 1 generation of software upgrades. And when i say upgrades, i mean like real software upgrades like Deluge, MPC, Push, etc…even iPhones and iPads support multiple generations of OS upgrades.
They seem to choose the lowest possible costing chipsets to build good enough hardware that demos well but lacks any bandwidth to support a proper software platform to evolve and grow and experiment with.
It feels very much like ID/Eng student concept products at this stage based on the amount of Legacy products they have in their portfolio.
These are synths and not cars for crying out loud. It doesn’t take too much thought provocation to ask how extensible is the hardware we’re choosing to embed in our gear to insure we provide the most value to our customers and future customers…
This is definitely not happening at PE.
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Hrmmmm
Poly
End
Poly is defined as many…
So is 4 legacy / dead products a sign of the End?
(Perq, Seq, OG Tracker, OG Play…)
Ya know what at least the Digitakt got song mode and audio over USB when connected to an iPad…so don’t give me the hardware limitation argument…cause it’s all software driving these boxes ya know 
Yeah. Or just offer the board for those with some DIY skills
As being said earlier. In total you would be paying 1200€ for a Play +, plus shipping costs. A bit too much
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Legacy products which they proudly flaunt on their webpage. Are products with a 3-year production life span something to be proud of? Tracker was a massive success for them, so with the Play I for some reason thought they are entering into a new era as a company. It seems that I was naive and it’s just more of the same from here on out.
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Yeah, something funny is going on during these hardware roadmap meetings. My guess is that they are hiring university students to do their programming or something.
Who builds hardware and software products with such a limited shelf life?
They must be making a killing on their margins from the looks of how horrible their hardware configs are that they can’t support basic software updates.
I think the new price of the OG Play just tips their hat at how much this unit actually should cost. My gut says $299 for actual actual cost. But i am just speculating.
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And when he was acting like a man child defending them
They managed to squeeze usb audio via an old fart usb connector on the OG OP1. So yeah…
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That right there makes you love TE and Elektron…and Akai…and Synthstrom…surprise and delight and shower your customers with love at different times.
This whole Play and Tracker nonsense is like buying your girl a nice Diamond, and 2 weeks later she demands a nicer one with .5 more carat.
Time to get a new girl one would say
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