Moog Music Forum

this keyboard looks awful. really clumsy design. how the hell is the weight of the back panel supported? If it is fake its pretty elaborate, but im not liking the design one bit.

I agree. If it is real, its a very poor physical design. It looks like its about to topple over.

The pictures are different. Check out the left-hand controls, next to the keys.

OysterRock wrote:Ah, yes. The mythic SMS 2000. Is it real, is it fake? Is it old, is it new? Oh, the excitement.

If its real, that's one hell of a marketing ploy.

No idea if it's for real or not, but SMS was a real company. Small Modular Systems (SMS), based in San Francisco, got into the synth market in the early 1980's, producing a monophonic synth called the Voice 400. According to "Vintage Synthesizers", the Voice 400 included two VCO's, a multimode VCF, VCA, an AR and two ASDR EGs, an LFO, a sequencer (1024 notes) and an analog delay.

No word in the book about the SMS 2000 - maybe it's a prototype that never made it to market. Perhaps it has something to do with those enormous pitch bend levers!


Greg

goldphinga wrote: how the hell is the weight of the back panel supported?

For me, this is the give away, having now seen this second view. The back doesn't appear to be supported in any way, and would surely weigh more than the Voyager's! I reckon this is, almost certainly, a superb piece of 3D rendering, composited with a photograph, as the left cheek panel of the synth, isn't reflected in the glass counter top. If this is the case, it is still a brilliant piece of work, whatever your thoughts on the 'synth'.

Obviously there must be some kind of support back there. I doubt anybody on this board has x-ray vision. It's standing up in the pictures just fine. Could even be the same kind of support the Voyager has. It just has a different base design. No company is going to build a synth that can't stand up. I was looking at the shape of the top part, and it looks like if you removed it from the hinge, it would make a nice keyboardless synth module. And the breakout box looks nicer than the Voyagers one.

And it seems obvious this is no computer rendering here.

I was just looking at the hinge between the keyboard and panel parts. It looks the same as the Voyager's. It's not the kind of hinge that holds weight, so there must be a mechanism that can't be seen holding the panel part up. It's probably centered in the middle of the synth, but there is no photo of the synth from the side so it can be seen. All phots are most from the front. The bottom keyboard unit might be shaped like a T. My dad, an artist, had an easel shaped like that.

No, this does look genuine, but I still think the previous view is CGI. Other reasons for this are the controls on the left side being different (as already pointed out) and the fact that there is a logo on the right hand side.

The question has to be: Is the synth nothing more than a mock-up, or a prototype which has never gone into production?

Interesting. A little searching around the net I found that a Japaness company called Seekers had a sketch of a prototype synth called the SMS 1000. They also had a vocoder called the Voice Spectra. Found this drawing of the SMS 1000.

Your comment about this photo being real but the other being CGI doesn't make sense. If a real physical synth or mockup exists, there is no need to then create the whole thing with CGI. That's double work. Maybe one is a prototype, the other is a production unit. That's why there are design changes. That makes more sense. Especially when one is sitting on a store counter.

Now why would anyone take a picture with the plastic half on unless they were going out of their way to show that this is an un-Photoshopped pic?

It looks pretty cool. What's with those mod and pitch "wheels"?

That other synth seems P-Shopped to me.

Googled "SMS 2000" and found a number of websites where people are commenting about this synth. Some believe it's real, others are skeptical.

If it's not real, then someone is going to a lot of trouble to stage an elaborate hoax. Personally, I'd guess the photos are of a real hardware one-off (or two) that is either a prototype or a mockup.

Related: Didn't Bob Moog show a mockup of an early Voyager design at a NAMM show in the early 2000's to get reaction and feedback of the concept?


Greg

It's as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny...If you do some detective work starting in the AH archives you'll find out the story behind this cool and realistic work of rendering and the guy behind it..very talented indeed.

Yeah, I believe they're both real physical objects too. I don't see where one looks P-shopped. I don't think people understand the work involved in 3D modeling and rendering and then compositing into a real scene so it looks real. Even Hollywood can't always get it right.

And I believe the whiteface one is from earlier photos. So to think somebody anticipated they were going to do fake photoshopped photos later, and should try to prove ahead of time the synth is real by putting plastic around it doesn't make sense. The plastic is around it because of another picture of it being packed or unpacked for some tradeshow booth. I think that close up photo would obviously show a real synth whether there was plastic over it or not. Not to mention the number of pictures of the synth. Hard enough to do all that work once, but over and over again just seems like too much. That store picture is only one of four pictures of the blackface. A couple of them appear to be in someones synth setup.

I saw a lot of the talk but never saw any real outcome. Many people were simply saying it was a hoax by some guy with no reasoning or proof behind it. Some things they were saying were just not true at all. So I don't know if it's been resolved either way yet. Even you are refering to it as a rendering when it clearly isn't. See, that's the problem. If you say a photo of a real thing is a rendering when it's not, then how can anybody know what to think. That's all that's been going on.

No one would take a picture of an object with the plastic half on it other than to prove a point.

However, the more I look at the first one, I'm thinking it's a real object. Thus, I change my opinion. Now whether or not it's a real working synth is another matter. I'm hoping that they are, and we will hear more about them soon.