Are there any "extinct" synthesizers?

[Tiger Jackson]

Synths that you WILL not EVER find anymore, like they are all dated from the earlist synth era and have all died out for not being built to last? Am i being unrealistic?

I expect some of ensoniqs synths to go all gone in probably like 50 years.. i'm not good at time estimating though.. we all know how much reliability problems some of them have had

[Ashe37]

why do you expect any Ensoniq synths to 'go extinct' more so than any other 'extinct' synth manufacturer?

[deeplow]

hammond novachord?

[Alex E]

hammond novachord?

Not quite, actually.

[bochelli]

If a model 2800 White Arp Odyssey can be agreed as one first synth, that synth is now 40 years old still here in number and lots working, other than a large chunk of space debris hitting the earth im sure they will be here in 50 years time be they are in a museum or in a old apartment in Ft Worth TX or in a lock up somewhere in Londons east end along with 4 Ensoniq mirage samplers.

[meatballfulton]

Maybe something that never made it from prototype to production like the Vermona Mephisto

[phesago]

The original 1 keybed version of the prophet 10. This was the original synth that predated the prophet 5. According to Dave at Wine Country, there is only about three that are known to exist at this current time. He said that most of the were either returned or hacked for parts due to religious unreliability.

[OntarioHydro]

Mcleyvier

[tim gueguen]

You probably need to differentiate between prototypes and stuff that actually entered production. There are all sorts of prototypes that you likely couldn't get to work anymore.

If I read the Laurie Spiegal article that appeared in The Wire correctly she has a Mcleyvier, and it's working, or partily working. There's also someone out there with a partially working Con Brio system.

[Sir Ruff]

Maybe something that never made it from prototype to production like the Vermona Mephisto

Looks interesting... where can I buy one of these?

[masstronaut]

If I read the Laurie Spiegal article that appeared in The Wire correctly she has a Mcleyvier, and it's working, or partily working.

Loving this McLeyvier piece by Laurie Spiegel. Worth digging a Real Audio player out for. (VLC works fine.)

http://retiary.org/ls/music/realaudio/o ... _a_myth.rm

[CS_TBL]

*cough* .. I could see all these 30 gold-edition Moogs being stolen (by the same kind of cons who steal copper from railways) and melted into bars. The rest is then probably thrown away.

Or is this too evil to think about?

[_seph]

well, there is Con Brio... which might as well be extinct. Only two ADS200 and one ADS200R are known to exist and I believe they are all now owned by the same person and who knows if they still work.

[Bitexion]

The Con Brio is also known as the most faulty synth ever created.

[cornutt]

Well, there were a lot of one-offs like the RCA Synthesizer and the Allis Machine. There is an RCA Synthesizer remaining, but my understanding is that it's in pretty bad shape. The Allis Machine is in storage in Oberlin College where it has not functioned since 1981, and who knows what shape it's in now.

And, as pointed out with the Mephisto, there's things that never made it past the protoype stage. The original E-mu Audity and the Moog SL-8 are two that come to mind. They are in museums but in non-working condition. Is there a Moog Apollo remaining anywhere? It is my understanding that Keith Emerson has a working Lyra. I wonder what happened to the ARP Centuar; I suspect it was scrapped in the bankruptcy proceedings.

My guess is that of the synths that were actually produced in more than onesey-twosey quantities, the ones to disappear first will be ones that had both poor reliability and lots of custom ICs. The Polymoog is on the short list, and things like the Prophet-2000 may not be far behind. Digital synths in general are going to be more vulnerable to this, because most analog stuff can be re-created in discrete circuitry if need be, although there does come a point where it becomes impractical. (Imagine trying to re-create all of the guts of, say, a Rhodes Chroma in discrete circuitry.) I know that some Alesis stuff had a lot of custom ICs. I don't know what's in the guts of a Hartmann Neuron, but I know that not that many were sold, so that may be a suspect too. E-mu had a lot of custom IC's too, but most of their stuff was produced in large quantities, so most of their stuff should be around for a while.

One thing that is going to become a problem eventually is synths that use the type of microprocessors where the code ROM is embedded in the processor, and not readable externally. In those cases, re-creating parts is hostage to whether the source code is available. A lot of Roland and Yamaha stuff could be hit by this.