Moog Music Forum

When I bought my TE, the thought never occured to me that it might change and evolve over time. I based my decision soley on the fact that it is a collector's piece and a "tribute" to Mr. Moog. Period. You expect bugs to be fixed, but upgrades? I bought it because of what it was, not because of what it was going to become.I'd still love it even if it was the same as when I opened the box. These upgrades are a bonus, not expectations.
I see the stage as a whole different instrument. If you like the features of it better than the TE, then that's the one you need to get. The fact is, they are not the same instrument.
I can't help but wonder the age of some of the people on this forum. They probably never had the chance to buy a new $3900.00 Prophet 5 Rev. 3, only to have the 3.2 released a few months later.

For what it's worth......
(and coming down solidly on the side of MoogMusic)...
Try a different perspective. As we all know,
the Little Phatty family all comprise several extremely
important ingredients.

1) 2 Moog VCOs with continuously variable waveshape,
sync, octave shift, fine freq control,.....

2) The awesome ladder filter (with OD, pole selector, EG....)

3) Two ADSR contour generators

4) Beautiful keyboard, panelling and mod/pitch wheels

6) RAC of many of the parameters

7) A 1:1 (or 1:2) mod bus and computer generated LFO

Its a good bet that most people want an LP because the oscillators (1)
and filter (2) give the Moog sound. These two ingredients are
permanent, classic and in many people's opinion features of the Little Phatty family to be most cherished. You can't upgrade these and
if you all were to take a look under the hood of the phatty you
would see a cute line of transistors and capacitors somewhere on
the PCB which is responsible for giving us all so much sonic pleasure.
Without doing some synth DIY, that little ladder filter is a permanent
and unchanging heart of a Phatty, as are the oscillators.

The bit that is causing so much upset here is that there is a CPU and
memory containing firmware in the Phatty. It is in charge of LFO
duties, RAC, patch storage etc. Naturally the firmware can be
altered, which is what Moog Music is doing. This approach has
been going on since the 1980's, but Moog Music are being really
creative with the changes that they make, which in my opinion
is fantastic. Now, it is easy to accept that software (firmware) when not
pirated has a dollar value (although the LP editor threads on this forum
contained many posters who disagreed), so by changing the firmware
I admit you are in a way changing the dollar value of your Phatty.
The question is by how much. If the perceived change is so big that it
dwarfs the value of the key ingredients mentioned above, then it
would probably be the case that the perceiver has purchased the
Phatty for the wrong reasons. If the perceived change is small compared
with creating music with the Moog sound then its probably not worth talking about, and whilst a small company does a great job, if you don't mind, I'll get back to my Phatty filter tweaking................

Steril707 wrote:Must be awesome to deliberately misunderstand other peoples posts and worries, and make fun of them.

Let's see... People bought what was essentially a V1.0 synth originally released in 2006 and are complaining because the V2.0 released in 2008 has more features and if they want those features they'll have to pay for an upgrade. Someone even referred to it as abuse. What am I not understanding?

I can still make music with my synths with or without OS updates. It's not like they magically stopped working when a new model came out or when the OS went out of development. If people don't want to spend the money on a 2.0 upgrade they don't have to. Their LP will still work the same way it did when they bought it.

This thread is humorous to me, upgrade or not to upgrade that is the question ? LOL

Amos,

Tks for the continued information. I will be upgrading my TE when available to do so including the desolder memory job.

It is unbelievable that Moog gives us free upgrades. Don't change that for love or money.. its what keeps us happily coming back to Moog as repeat customers as we show our loyalty for your collective efforts. YOUR active voice on the board here means more than you know as well. Please pass this feeling up the chain.

Can you "guess" what it might cost us TE owners to ship & it to you & back for a full upgrade? Just a rough idea if you please.
Also, I assume the USB will be there for the TE as well right?

One thing I'd like to see is the addition of both the TE & SE presets into one list. Some are common but it would be good to have ALL of them handy to run through, especially for a synth n00b like myself. Maybe there should just be 200 presets, eh?

Btw, the 2nd power supply for my Etherwave did the trick.. I called you a month or so ago. Tks for all mate. You know you rock.

jon_kull wrote:

Steril707 wrote:Must be awesome to deliberately misunderstand other peoples posts and worries, and make fun of them.

Let's see... People bought what was essentially a V1.0 synth originally released in 2006 and are complaining because the V2.0 released in 2008 has more features and if they want those features they'll have to pay for an upgrade. Someone even referred to it as abuse. What am I not understanding?

People are complaing because the other V1.0 model is so far ahead of features, that their model, which was supposed to be "superior" to the other one somehow, is not capable of being upgraded to the same level than the cheaper V1.0 model.


If you don't get this, and why people (me included) feel weird about this, i cannot help you.

Steril707 wrote:People are complaing because the other V1.0 model is so far ahead of features, that their model, which was supposed to be "superior" to the other one somehow, is not capable of being upgraded to the same level than the cheaper V1.0 model.


If you don't get this, and why people (me included) feel weird about this, i cannot help you.

Superior how? Who said? I don't recall anyone saying that the Tribute was the superior model. The Tribute was advertised as a limited edition synth with wood ends and a signature. People that bought it (myself included) paid extra for a limited edition synth with wood ends and a signature. The Stage was advertised as the cheaper alternative because it had rubber ends, no signature and would be produced in more numbers. I don't recall the Stage being advertised as inferior to the Tribute in any way.

No I don't get it and I guess we can't help each other. Let's just agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Er, in the middle of this confrontation, I'm bumping my question about the EGR Matrix bug...
Would it be solved by the OS update?

A quick note about all that upgrade frenzy...
Quoting from a september 2006 www.bluesynths.com review I'm just reading :
"In a perfect world the Little Phatty would contain a noise generator, a stereo output with panorama modulation and some sort of little, tiny sequencer / arpeggiator..."

A quick note about all that upgrade frenzy...
Quoting from a september 2006 www.bluesynths.com review I'm just reading :
"In a perfect world the Little Phatty would contain a noise generator, a stereo output with panorama modulation and some sort of little, tiny sequencer / arpeggiator..."

_________________



yeah.. i mean.. is this REALLY asking too much??
a sequencer and a noise source should be added in the next OS

djghostdogg wrote:

a sequencer and a noise source should be added in the next OS

Oh man.
A noise generator would be AMAZING in the phatty.

The point actually was that the noise source was added in the previous update, and the arp is due in the next one
Welcome to the "perfect world"

But the noise source is only a modulation source, not an audio one.

But I have a cp-251, I don't care

It's a noise source anyway, you can't have everything
Who would have thought back in the ole days that a noise source could be added at all on an analog synth without hardware upgrade?
Obviously it didn't even came to mind to that reviewer in 2006

arpeggiator !!!

cant wait.

thank you moog