Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

http://bringelkaback.com/index.html

Let's see what happens here...

Belated April's Fool?

What's next? CS80?

Stephen

I wasn't sure either, but it wasn't posted on the 1st...

It's legit. That's the company that bought the Elka brand. I guess it's a way of surveying the market for a remake. I'd sign up, but I'd never be able to afford one.

21 followers on Twitter...

How will they get CEM's enough you reckon?

Cybercardinal wrote:How will they get CEM's enough you reckon?

Rumors a while back mentioned that Behringer (who now have their own plant) were to start re-manufacturing Curtis chips for their own analogue poly. The revived GEM company would be an obvious customer

Broadwave wrote:

Cybercardinal wrote:How will they get CEM's enough you reckon?

Rumors a while back mentioned that Behringer (who now have their own plant) were to start re-manufacturing Curtis chips for their own analogue poly. The revived GEM company would be an obvious customer

Yeah Uli posted on GS, full post here: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/10679299-post542.html

In order to pursue our plans, we realized that we needed specific engineering horse power in both the analog and digital domains. On the analog side, because most classic designs are based on Curtis/SSM chips which are no longer available, we looked into replacing these legacy components with equivalent parts with exactly the same functionality. We partnered up with a semiconductor foundry Coolaudio and developed analog and mixed architecture semiconductors such as VCA’s and the highly desirable BBD’s (Bucket Brigade Delay lines) used in analog chorus and delay effects such as the original Juno’s etc.
At the same time we studied the legacy Curtis and SSM chips and we’re in the process of designing our own versions of these highly regarded IC's in collaboration with Coolaudio.

Duuuuuude. This could be interesting.

Definitely exciting news! I signed up and I'll keep my fingers crossed some money starts to rain here

Some patent-holding j**k will probably clamp down on their Curtis chip recreations and demand so much in "royalties" that the project will die before it even started.

Remember what happened to ARP when they cloned the Moog ladder filter back in the 70s?

Far out, didn't expect that.

I kinda have mixed feelings about it though, on the one had it's awesome news, on the other I'd hazard a guess that it'll cost about as much as the old ones do anyway. Plus what else did the old Elka brand have to offer before? Sorry but not exactly full of memorable products, one hit doesn't make a company...

And an Italian brand resurrected in Finland? err right.

The synthex was hardly a "hit" anyway, it was just used prominently by some very famous artists like Stevie Wonder and Jean-Michel Jarre (everyone knows the laserharp sound is a Synthex).

It came out just as the digital synths took over the planet, and was incredibly hard to market to people who would just laugh at such an old relic or compare it with their Prophet-5 and Jupiter-8s and whatnot. And why would people wanna buy a knob-heavy synth like that when the latest and the greatest were DX7s and other synths with no knobs and fancy computer interfaces were all the rage?

Paul Wiffen tried to market it to musicians at NAMM 1984 and was met with mostly mocking laughter at a synth that looked like an old relic, that used a chorus effect to cheat to sound "fatter" because it had digital oscillators.
"Turn off the chorus, ok it just sounds weaker than my Prophet lulz is this a string machine?"

Elka were sadly 4 years too late to the analogue synth train.

Bitexion wrote:Some patent-holding j**k will probably clamp down on their Curtis chip recreations and demand so much in "royalties" that the project will die before it even started.

Remember what happened to ARP when they cloned the Moog ladder filter back in the 70s?

As far as I know, patents for Curtis chips expired.

salwa wrote:

Bitexion wrote:Some patent-holding j**k will probably clamp down on their Curtis chip recreations and demand so much in "royalties" that the project will die before it even started.

Remember what happened to ARP when they cloned the Moog ladder filter back in the 70s?

As far as I know, patents for Curtis chips expired.

It would have to be expired by now. Patents are only good for 20 years.