A. To test market desire for such a thing.
B. Because people are “stupid”.
I’m not making anyone stupid here. I backed the grey version instantly.
But I’m sure there are a lot of people who did the same.
Example: I live in Romania. Wages are way lower than Spain. But prices are higher than Spain (food, clothes). And people still buy.
That’s what we do. We see buttons … buy. Throw in a screen that shows a waveform? Pff… I literally see the money flying from the wallet.
Question for Liven 12 users:
Is the whole audio engine running in lofi?
I mean if you have stereo 24/44.1 samples do they crap them out when importing?
So you’re going to ignore the extra LFOs, pitch envelope, amplitude modulation, Real time sample editing, Note retrigs, P-lockings, Background mixtape recording, extra resolution in note length (1/32 vs 1/64) and 11 simultaneous effects vs 3 ?
Thats literally as different as it gets.
The original lofi 12 is already vintage 
“….So you’re going to ignore….”
Actually I ignored nothing. What I said is:
That’s what I said.
We don’t know at all what’s doable or not but it’s the same box with a gazillion features. The SmplTrek should be able to do real time sample editing.
Thanks.
I went to Bucharest to visit relatives and if you’re kickstarting lo-fi samplers you must be doing very well.
-Its speculative to claim any feature specific to any elektron box aint possible on another.
-Elektron products are premium priced, not cheerful low cost.
-No attack control on the models is a glaring omission
-“takt” “tone” “syn” seems like product segmentation rather than incapability
“thanks”
Or I have a medical condition. GAS 
This isn’t accurate.
SmplTrek: $429
Lofi XT: $499
Lofi XT Retro: $559
and its like 379 USD if you back it up early.
Only annoying thing is you apparently cannot opt out of the “lofi” mode when sampling things on it.
It’s called the Lofi XT for a reason 
The workflow seems nicer than SmplTrek (the regular LOFI 12 too).
It’s more elektron like. Load samples into ram slots, put one sample per step (so you can basically have drums on 1 track).
And slicing is a sampler mode… like Digitakt. No need to destructively slice… save, reload… bleah…
And param automation. Ticks all my boxes. Glad I backed it. I’ll melt until April, but it is what it is…
These guys sure know how to market and they already have a fanbase to support this.
These features should easily been a software update.
Definitely
I thought so at first, and while I’d expect/hope SMPLTREK continues to get firmware enhancements, I’ve no problem if they want to sell effectively an alternative firmware for the same hardware.
‘should’ offer it for free is not really fair to assume of any vendor just because you’ve already bought one of their other devices.
It would have been better though if they also said the XT firmware could be unlocked on an SMPLTREK for e.g. $ 149.99 … if you want it. Happy to have the option to support a vendor and pay them for their work.
This is an example of pricing in Europe
are you a software engineer? Do you know what CPU they use as hardware? Do you have any idea if there’s any available memory to allow the smpletrek to get all these features or are you just hating for the sake of hating?
Yeah Would have been nice to have the Model:Cycles firmware to unlock for 149USD for people who own the Model:samples… that’s totally how companies make a profit.
/s
As a heavy SmplTrek user I can’t see how these could have lived on the same device. It’s an entirely different workflow. They redesigned the experience to access effects, envelopes, etc. and it’s not clip-based at all. The LXT seems to be more gearbox oriented while the SmplTrek is more songwriting focused.
