Here's a pair of Waldorf notes. B&H has created a pre-order page for a new string synth / vocoder, called the STVC. It's essentially a Streichfett with a vocoder. I like my own Streichfett, but I'm not seeing the value here at $900. If the Streichfett was about $350 USD, I don't see a 4-octave keyboard making it worth nearly triple that. Considering that Roland has a boutique vocoder module for $350 (strings/vocoder), the price differential really doesn't make much sense. They're both digital after all. For $900, it seems fairly skeletal, compared to some of the recent offerings by other companies. You can acquire a 5-octave Yamaha or Roland with decent pads, organs, acoustic piano banks and more for $600-700.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/ ... sizer.htmlUnfortunately it seems Waldorf has come up well short of their original goal for the Quantum. They had been dancing around $3,000 to $3,500, but the pre-order price on Sweetwater and B&H shows a whopping $4,299. Eight voices of digital polyphony for $4K doesn't really compute, when you look at recent analog trends. I realize the Quantum is significantly more powerful than previous Waldorf models, but the Alesis Andromeda was 16 analog voices and $3,000 in 2010. I wonder how much of the $4,299 tag is tied up in that large touch screen (15-20%?). As much as I like the ability to edit waves and filters onscreen, $4K is really hard to get excited about, when you consider what can be done with soft synths and analog hardware models. You could purchase an OB-6 & a P~6 desktop module for about $4K, giving you 16 voices of analog power, along with 4 simultaneous SHARC-based effects. That's a lot of synth with double the polyphony. As someone who recently got the Arturia bundle (Buchla, CS-80, Moog, ARP, Oberheim) for $399, it's hard for me to justify spending 10x that on one digital synth, which appears to be an evolution of the Waldorf Nave app. For $4K, you could buy/build a powerful desktop computer, an army of soft synths, and an MPE controller. All I can do is shrug in disbelief at that price tag.