Still not convinced from Polyend in general. BUT the idea of upgrading an instrument in a few things that matter and offer it at a discount for those who own the first edition seems like a great idea for Elektron as well.
Just think of a Digitakt+ with stereo sampling and big internal memory or HD card.
I don’t think anyone is against the idea, i think people are just upset at how soon it is happening…for a 2 year old product to already be obsolete or a “Legacy” product in the eyes of PE is just insane.
Well that’s how i am interpreting the news from PE.
I’m all for hardware updates…but in less than 2 years? Come on…PE needs to do better planning when working with hardware and software.
This is just careless and cavalier.
I mean look at 1010music who said audio over USB would never happen on the BleuBox.
It’s software for the win!
They probably would have been better to release a Tracker MK2 with the functionality that the Tracker Mini. It’s really odd that a Play+ comes out before a Tracker MK2, especially when people have been expecting it given the huge sale the Tracker had a few months ago.
This whole PE nonsense just makes me realize how innovative and forward looking the Deluge is.
My guess is Polyend needed to release the OG Play, but couldn’t source the hardware they wanted at the time that would scale, but they needed to sell and make money as a company so they compromised. And it seems they’ve compromised again by offering a trade-in to offset the cost. I have mixed feelings. If they had pushed sampling and waveform editing into the Plus version the upgrade would have seemed more significant. This has the same sample memory (less with stereo), some synth engines, and streaming audio output. Nice updates, but missing the features that would have pushed into towards modern device capabilities.
Someone on this forum is adding the performance functions of the Polyend Play to the Deluge. Apparently there’s a video on Facebook. But the level of development the community added to the deluge in the past year has been incredible and then the optional upgrades have been reasonably priced as well.
It’s incredible how far that thing has come in 5 years and how much further it’s going thank to community development.
Don’t worry. If their track record is any indication we can expect another hardware update in 2-3 years, with inherent constraints.
They really need to learn the art of working backwards.
Decide exactly what you want in your product, that you know will change hearts and minds. Put everything in to it and then begin the hard task of asking for justification of each. Then plan out a 5 year roadmap of how…ahhh ya know what, never mind. This line of thinking isn’t worth it…
Holy shit, I just realized ST is only 1 month older than the Play. Imagine if Elektron revealed Syntakt Mk2 
What if Elektron would release a syntakt plus however ?
With more DSP power and thus more lfos, some extra fx and 4 more analog tracks?
I’d be cool with it cuz I’m a fanboy
They wouldn’t release it a year later for the same MSRP though…
Even if they released it a year later, it would be marked up accordingly.
At least that’s my impression of Elektron.
Perhaps, however the finances of a company are not consumers responsibility. Usually companies with bad ebit will lay off staff for example.
In my opinion Polyend should have spent a lot more time developing Tracker before moving on to other products.
I’m speculating, but I have a feeling this is a strong case of the CEO’s vision not aligning with the market. It happens all the time, CEO or board demands become higher and higher, devs struggle to meet unrealistic deadlines and as a result get stuck in a loop of half baked products.
Trying not to sound biased, but in this example I highly doubt it would be released a year later. The time between AH and AHFX lifecycle is the more apt comparison here.
The Syntakt board itself is packed to the brim compared to Digitakt and Digitone (double the CPU if I am not mistaken), and yet we still got two of the largest updates for Digitakt ever recently. We also see that even though Syntakt & AHFX are new products, things like I/O itself are not up to modern spec (USB-C, MIDI 2.0). If I had to speculate, these are likely the last new products we will see on the existing architecture. So yes, they probably could be refreshed somewhere down the road. So far Elektron MKII hasn’t been that kind of upgrade aside from visuals, buttons & UI. That’s a different class of upgrade.
Another difference here is company roadmap signalling - Elektron doesn’t really indicate if updates are coming (but we know they are coming in the case of Syntakt), they just happen.
I did hear some speculation elsewhere that the move to the Play+ might be tied to the chip they were using going out of production… which I suppose put them in the awkward position of do you quietly upgrade the chip but treat the device the same or do you update the device. If you think about it that way it starts to make a bit more sense to why so soon but the handling of this by Polyend just seems poor, there upgrade path feels more like a business opportunity they schemed up than a good eco friendly, customer friendly, small company mentality. Compared to like Deluge or Cirklon offering upgrade routes to products people may have had for years at prices aimed to get customers an upgrade and not to be another profit stream.
the fact that “eco friendly” is even mentioned in any of this is proof positive to me that they are putting up smoke screens to try to hide their nonstop blunders
The new updates are amazing, not to mention Deluge CPU capacity can’t be better than Play’s, can it?
We know the Deluge uses a Renasas RZ which apparently has 400mhz processor. You can easily find a post from Rohan detailing it. I would be curious to know what chip the Play and Play+ use
Depends on the price. If i had bought the old Syntakt for 950 a year ago and now they release the new one for the same price and the old one goes down to 650?
I think i would be pissed.
This is very unlikely and would have been foreseen before play was even released. Chips don’t suddenly go out of production and then that’s it.
The Tracker is based on a teensy and that microprocessor is still available.
Anyone with a polyend play that wants to open it up and show what’s inside?