What the...Akai discontinuing hardware MPCs???

Just saw this on another forum, and apparently it's already happened. I just checked the major online stores and it's true--there's no more stock. How did I miss this? I guess I'm going to have to be very careful with my 500 from now on...

Akai stopped manufacturing hardware MPC's well before the Ren was even announced. the last 1000 made was almost 2 years ago. all the hardware between then and the announced discontinuations have been already manufactured dead stock.

Machine Life wrote:I guess I'm going to have to be very careful with my 500 from now on...

Spare are easy to come by at the moment, but oblivious as the years pass some parts maybe more harder to come by then others.

If you ever see a cheap 500 then buy it and keep it safe, you can always use it as donor machine when the time comes when you can't get hold of a part or what not.

Yeah Tag is dead right. XL's have been discontinued for almost 8 years now and they are still everywhere. (granted you have the LCD issue, but the quantity of units is high overall).

Good advice too on grabbing another perfect one just in case or even a damaged one to cannibalise for parts. I have a 2nd XL with 16 lines on the screen. I could if the v. 2.0 replacement LCD's come out soon pay $180 to get it back 100% perfect.

But it's just as beneficial to not do that and look at how much it would cost to buy all the parts individually. All of the sudden that XL's potential value actually is higher than the $200-$250 it would get as is or the $400-$500 I would get selling it after the screen re-up. Because in some cases one single part would cost $100 to source.

Bummer. I always felt MPCs would be around forever (at least the hardware-only type), but I guess the future (or money anyway) is in hybrid devices like Maschine and Ren, etc.

Machine Life wrote:Bummer. I always felt MPCs would be around forever (at least the hardware-only type), but I guess the future (or money anyway) is in hybrid devices like Maschine and Ren, etc.

I don't fully buy the idea that Akai from a business standpoint can't profit off hardware in the present. Would they sell more Rens and Studios? Yeah probably, but they can get $300-$700 more on every unit if a hardware model is available too.

Also the fact that prior to the Ren's announcement and release more than half this forum was on that "oooohhhh computers...icky unless it's a PT track out". That sure changed quick...

But if there was no money in hardware you wouldn't see Korg re-releasing the MS-20. Sure the hardware may not sell quite the numbers of hybrid solutions or cheap MIDI controllers, but a business worth it's salt should grasp economies of scale and see that you can run concurrent business models, satify more customers and make more money.

But clearly Akai has their hands full trying to have a team of 6 coders write their present and future. (I feel for Pete and those dudes is my point. I couldn't see a team that small doing better than what we've seen so far. I think they just have too big an undertaking for a small team.)

Machine Life wrote:I always felt MPCs would be around forever

They will be, so don't sweat it. As long as there's a demand they won't die completely. I bought an SP-12 recently that was apparently "the 3rd unit in the UK"... 28 years later and it's still in ridiculously good condition for its age.

Metatron72 wrote:But if there was no money in hardware you wouldn't see Korg re-releasing the MS-20. Sure the hardware may not sell quite the numbers of hybrid solutions or cheap MIDI controllers, but a business worth it's salt should grasp economies of scale and see that you can run concurrent business models, satify more customers and make more money.

The MS-20 sales figures (and profit) will piss all over the Ren and Studio combined within 18 months of release. I doubt Akai are anywhere near profit on the Ren so far, with R&D costs and wages taken into account.

Nick Batt and his pals always mention that they meet kids all the time who have a purely hardware based studio. Ironically it's hardware that is having the renaissance.

Dead on as usual Coz. Although you left out all that "Shawty Red" money they wasted.

My 20 year old ASR is the oldest thing over here, but yeah the further back you go the longer the gear lasts with prior superior built standards.

I am curious to the amount of Rens/Studios that they need to sell to get out of the red on the whole affair. But that kind of information is hard to come by. Best you could do is try to find how many have been made and pro rate some guesses.

I don't know what the Shawty Red situation was, but if it's related to Nukai's travels around the globe getting 'known' producers to pretend the Ren was in the same room, then yeah, total waste of money!

Tutor's got a good idea of what the costs are. They're doing very well if they make £150-200 from each sale of the Ren. Their wage bill must be in the region of £15k per month for everyone working directly with the product, plus they would have sunk a huge pile of cash into the development.

The MS-20 Mini was re-imagined by the 2 dudes who designed it originally.

Nice that Korg got the OG's, that's dope.

Shawty Red was the bootiest of those dudes they featured.

Yeah the start up cost would be deep, but you'd have to think steady sales they might do OK, as the profit margin has to be way above a 1000 or 2500. (even using archaic components interior wise). I mean no trolling intended but the inside of the Ren is as cheap and plastic as an MPD32 I got new for $250 USD out the door.

And it's not like they're paying 30 coders.... (respect to Pete and the team for doing what they can under what I'd term "coding duress")

I find this troubling, what do they propose? That we all carry a laptop and controller? Its odd that musical instruments designed hundreds of years ago are still around but more recent stuff comes and goes.

Who makes the xr20?

Radical Edwards wrote:I find this troubling, what do they propose? That we all carry a laptop and controller? Its odd that musical instruments designed hundreds of years ago are still around but more recent stuff comes and goes.

Who makes the xr20?

Yeah clearly, they want the MPC lines future to never exist without a computer being necessary. I'm not against it, but I likely would have forked over $2000 for a unit that can do both. Maybe it's just me but win/win sounds good.

xr20 is Akai, although who knows if those are still being made. In fairness it is very common in the industry to stop manufacture months or over a year before actually killing off the retail SKU # in retailers product databases.

Actually that's how I knew the last 1000 was made 2 years ago and knew the 2500 was discontinued before they announced it. My friend just ran the SKU's at his job at GC.

Thing is I use my 500 more often as a portable device than a desktop device, moores law has made it more viable for akai to build controllers that take advantage of freely available computing power that wasnt available when the mpc was originally conceived (amount of laptops in 2013, vs amount of laptops(and size) in 1989). Playing MPC on the L train on lap , easy, balancing laptop and controller on lap on L train, long to say the least especially if I start gettin on. If the 500 wasnt portable I wouldnt have bought it, portability was a deal sealer/breaker. controller/laptop combination is too cumbersome to be portable in the true sense, how would I hi jak the souns system in the lecture hall with all that fumblin?

Maybe the Fly is the beggining of something to suit me, but for now its a par.

"MPC On the L Train", that's an album title right there man.

Yeah man good points on how if it's one unified box that's the optimum way as far as portability. All my work goes down at the house so Alesis dock was the perfect thing for me personally. But it's a shame that the Fly couldn't deliver a similar level of versatility in it's different yet related design ethos. (namely expanding an iPad to an easier to use device to create your music)

It's a shame that a 500XL was never schemed up. Maybe a bigger LCD, essentially a battery operated 1000 at maybe 60-74% of the weight and size of the 1000.

I'm not convinced that many end users are declaring hardware units 'dead', I believe this is more like the manufacturers telling us that hardware is dead to suit their own profit margins - the controller/software model is significantly more profitable in the long term. They just don't want to make hardware units any more. I'm not saying I don't understand their need to make profit, but I definitely don't buy into their insistance that hardware is only good as a 'dumb' controller for a software app.

I think Akai missed a trick. They got too far sucked in with the model NI adopted with Maschine. The thing is, NI have a software heritage, and their approach was to continue that heritage and enhance it with a dedicated hardware controller.

Akai on the other hand have a hardware heritage. Their approach should have been to take a standalone hardware unit and see how they could better integrate it with computers. The aim should have been to enhance the hardware, not abandon it.

I think more work should have done on improving the hardware. For example a nice big touch screen, utilising pinch and zoom, allowing you more tactile and immediate control of sample editing and chopping, drawing on sequencer events with your index finger etc. Quneo style pads, with zonal control. Perhaps investigate what was possible if they improved the internal processor and memory, perhaps in combination with a more basic software utility that runs on your computer to allow access to specific tasks that simply cannot be performed on hardware. An aksys style app. Or maybe something that could allow better communication with an existing DAW (or DAWs).

But ultimately not something that is effectively just trying to replicate functionality that already worked perfectly well in the standalone hardware. Let the hardware do what it does best.

I appreciate that for years people have been talking about a 'virtual MPC', a computer based app that functions like an MPC, however I don't believe that they saw it as an 'either-or' situation. It was more like a supplementary option to the existing hardware MPC.

Regarding the MPC Software, I'm confident that eventually, it will provide a decent experience and people will be very happy with it, but it's a shame if that means we lose the standalone hardware MPC in the process.