Call me a privileged moaner if you want, I won’t argue against it even as I’m writing this… you’re absolutely right! But I still have to say I feel a little disappointed about the lack of any interesting Syntakt updates.
There hasn’t been an exciting update for it since the year it was announced. It’s been almost two years without anything but minor bug fixes. Given Elektron’s track record of keeping their customers continuously re-excited about their instruments, the disappointment I feel is perhaps not so hard to understand.
It seems as if they abandoned the Syntakt and moved on to new things like the Digitakt 2 and now Tonverk. Perhaps the ROI of continuous work on their old hardware is too low now given that they supposedly run their new hardware on a different software platform. I’m sure there are reasonable business reasons for it, plus they’re a small company with few engineers after all (one of their engineers told me this once).
But still, I can’t help but feeling like they abandoned the Syntakt too soon. The trig mod thing is still a pretty unfinished feature. New machines were even promised in a social media post some 12 months ago. The analog drive page is still largely empty, as if you’re still playing Zelda with only 3 hearts. It just feels like they should have had something exciting to tease us with by now. I wouldn’t describe the Syntakt as an unfinished product by any means, but I’d say it doesn’t feel fully realized yet.
OK, I’m done complaining. I still love my Syntakt.
NEVER buy hardware on the assumption that any updates will come.
Over bridge needed? Don’t buy the DT2 till it’s out.
It’s easy to imagine potential of platforms (just model cycles would have so many things that could be done to improve it), but that’s not the product, development costs money. And especially here, with them investing in a new platform all that would be in vain for old ones.
Same will apply to tonverk.
(I’m not specifically calling you out, just found your post a good starting point for that reminder)
I’d make an exception: unless the manufacturer literally promises that they will come. Which was the case here.
Right, that was when they released the SY Swarm and SY Raw machines - the last/latest interesting update.
I don’t see this chronology as an indication that anything new for the Syntakt is necessarily around the corner, I rather see it as evidence they they haven’t lived up to their promise on social media of new machines coming.
Could be that they’re just very stretched thin at the moment, but it’s not great when a company that normally updates their hardware regularly goes silent like this for two years.
The chronology is to show how rare major updates are and what the wait times typically look like. I see nothing out of the ordinary here. They could have started work on the Rytm update years ago, and more Syntakt machines could be this year, next year, or two years from now. It wouldn’t be any kind of outlier compared to the release schedule.
SY RAW & SY SWARM might have come faster because they were near finished and didn’t make the final product launch. Anything is possible and everything is speculative.
Agreed. Anything is possible and you may be right that large updates are more rare. It just feels like the Digitakt and the Digitone had a much higher frequency of exciting updates within their first couple of years compared to the Syntakt. Granted, the Syntakt derived a more mature platform.
Yeah, again, I think anyone thinking I’m just complaining is probably right. I’m just expressing how I feel about it, regardless of any reasonable explanations why they haven’t updated it.
While I and others would welcome more insight from Elektron, their silence isn’t all that surprising to me given the hounding nature of some of the forum posting here. You can look at the TE threads as an example of how that plays out where one of their dev talks here about potential future updates and what they would like to add, then how users take that for gospel, and then attack the dev when nothing (or something else) materializes months down the road. Haven’t seen that dev around anymore now.
It would have been great for the 25th anniversary to get something like product history/dev interviews that go into detail on how long the development process is, but that is of a voluntary nature.
This seems to come in several threads now by multiple forum members. Any evidence of this social media post and did they really say “yes, we 100% promise new machines for the Syntakt”?
But what you are describing is one of those things that becomes heavily skewed and morphed because it has been passed through the rumor mill of he said she said so much. So it’s not a social media post and no one said it’s a 100% promise verbatim.
I’m just going to throw it out there…
to me, seems Elektron is marching forward with the new platform introduced with DT2 and now looks like being materialized in full with Tonverk (assuming it’s real), either way, they are drifting apart from the older systems in A4, AR, DT1, DN, etc., which probably means no significant updates will come for at least until DT2/Tonverk matured, so a year+, no less.
AND EVEN THEN, it will be probably way harder to go back and make creative updates, my guess is fixing bugs and maybe some improvements, but I suspect nothing major like rytm 1.70, with time it will be harder and harder to invest developer time in older things, devs leave, new ones have no idea what’s going on, etc.
OF COURSE I MIGHT BE WRONG, but that’s what I think…
Ok if it’s even on their website then it’s not that strange people have expectations like this. @djst: Ok, I get your feeling But we might just have to be a bit more patient (I guess the newer machines of Analog Rytm will eventually make it to the Syntakt).
If they said new machines are coming, then new machines are coming. I do think it can get a little frustrating when the wait for those promised machines stretches out for a year or more, but I think they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt, given how many times we’ve been here before and Elektron have come through in the end.
Also, I find the fairly common use of ‘promise/promised’ etc a really weird tone to take when it comes to music hardware manufacturers. ‘But you promised…’ is a bit…eesh. Not having a go, just think we should check ourselves on that sorta language and get back to making tunes probs huh?
But we might just have to be a bit more patient (I guess the newer machines of Analog Rytm will eventually make it to the Syntakt).
