Mark Carroll's Journal

I distantly recall that, a couple of decades ago, there were plenty of affordable sound modules in the market. One plugs in one's MIDI controller, tones are generated electronically, and good-quality sound comes out of the other end. With modern hardware, I can't imagine that there's much cost to them at all beyond the intellectual property for a good sample library for the instruments. Still, in briefly perusing the market, I notice Miditech Pianobox variants, not much else. What happened to the other stuff from Roland and Yamaha and company? For a lot of money, sure, various products exist, I am just surprised at the lack of options for, say, a couple of hundred dollars. Although it should be easy to offer capable equipment cheaply, what people actually seem to do is to buy the old stuff off eBay. Perhaps having modern music production all happen in one's Mac or whatever has caused the bottom to drop out of the market for external accessories for what is ultimately a computational solid-state task.