what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

beats me · Post by **beats me** » Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:11 pm

I won't get into specifics here but there has been plenty of hardware purchases I made over the years that I didn't quite "get" at the time and thought was a dumb impulse buy, later sold, and now they are considered The Shit and worth a small fortune.

Maybe that's for another thread. "The one that got away"

mikemc · Post by **mikemc** » Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:08 pm

beats me wrote:I won't get into specifics here but there has been plenty of hardware purchases I made over the years that I didn't quite "get" at the time and thought was a dumb impulse buy, later sold, and now they are considered The Shit and worth a small fortune.

Maybe that's for another thread. "The one that got away"

a friend of mine way back had a TR-606, and he mentioned that he had heard about people who would get into the insides of those types of things and tinker with the factory presets. I cautioned him no good ever came from messing with factory presets, and besides it sounded nothing like real drums even as it was: what improvements could be made by screwing it up?

D K · Post by **D K** » Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:23 pm

my first computer, an ibm thinkpad (very early version)
biggest piece of shit ever.

ahlstrominfo · Post by **ahlstrominfo** » Fri Jan 04, 2008 11:05 pm

My faderfoxes. Those sucked really heard.

dm_hawk · Post by **dm_hawk** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 12:01 am

akai mpd-24,

it was huge, heavy, the sliders and knobs were cheap and sent erratic, jittery data

Kodama · Post by **Kodama** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 12:20 am

Wow, and I thought the last two ^ were really nice!

Yhtomit · Post by **Yhtomit** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 1:30 am

Behringer C-1 mic.....

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:28 pm

popslut wrote:
Somebody I know spent £8000 [that's about $17,000 kids...] on a Waldorf Wave and ended up using it to put house plants on because three years after they bought it the operating software had still not been completed.

The best they ever got out of it was this kind of thin reedy pad sound and they were gutted later on when NI Absynth came along and completely outclassed it for £250.

Looked brilliant though.

@popslut

come on, you know that they also got a "snok-bickle-urgh-splaink" noise off it .
onto dat and into the akai

KU · Post by KU » Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:53 pm

Roland VG-8 Guitar Synth. It used the 13pin midi pickup thing, but instead of converting it to MIDI it did some other madness.

cost like $2000 and I picked it up because I had a rich girlfriend. I did like 6 gigs with it and actually had good times until I heard the tapes. the tone sucked.

and this was back in 1996, and the salesguy said I could use it to control outboard synths which was a lie so they took it back.

Jeroen · Post by **Jeroen** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:55 pm

M-audio ProjectMix.....

beginners choice ......

Is anybody still using that ugly thing?

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:16 pm

Thought I posted in this the first time it came up?

I've got a list, but the most costly would be the EMU E6400 Ultra. Bought it in about 99 and a little over a year later I was sold on Reason, I had limited sampling needs, so being able to call up a track with onboard FX like we take for granted now was too tempting.

popslut · Post by **popslut** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:17 pm

Angstrom wrote:they also got a "snok-bickle-urgh-splaink" noise off it...

That was probably Joie on his SH-5.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:26 pm

rozling wrote:
sparklepuff wrote:
I know how you feel. I am stubbornly sticking with it though because a) I won't be able to afford new MIDI controllers for a long time, b) I want one with dynamic displays anyway and can't afford an SL and c) I'm kind of addicted to the custom user page functon. When you have user pages set up the way you want them it's actually very sweet.

Oh yeah and d) I would get sweet f-all for this if I sold it

if you haven't upgraded to Kore 2 for some reason, then I would.
Kore 2 is everything I hoped Kore would become, Kore 1 got trumped by Lives Racks, and other DAW innovations to the point to where it didn't fulfill it's promise IMO.
Also, realistically if you don't have Komplete 4-5 then Kore isn't half as cool. The new step sequencer, and other things in K2 make it worth it and some IMO.
I'm just happy as shit being able to scroll through presets in Kore like you would on a workstation synth, that alone sold me.
Which brings up why the fuck did Ableton switch to that 'productivity killing browser based double click..... oops I opened up another of the same dammed effect instead of browsing presets' way of searching presets????

daniel_grieff · Post by **daniel_grieff** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:44 pm

Ill wade in here and add my M-Audio Ozonic to this list. Oh lawd I have had nothing but trouble with it from the get go. It slowly, and then progressively with greater speed, deteriorated into a useless pile of plastic.
Will never buy cheap again. Except behringer, I cant resist ^_^

rozling · Post by **rozling** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 9:45 pm

Machinesworking wrote:
rozling wrote:
sparklepuff wrote:kore
I know how you feel. I am stubbornly sticking with it though because a) I won't be able to afford new MIDI controllers for a long time, b) I want one with dynamic displays anyway and can't afford an SL and c) I'm kind of addicted to the custom user page functon. When you have user pages set up the way you want them it's actually very sweet.

Oh yeah and d) I would get sweet f-all for this if I sold it
if you haven't upgraded to Kore 2 for some reason, then I would.
Kore 2 is everything I hoped Kore would become, Kore 1 got trumped by Lives Racks, and other DAW innovations to the point to where it didn't fulfill it's promise IMO.
Also, realistically if you don't have Komplete 4-5 then Kore isn't half as cool. The new step sequencer, and other things in K2 make it worth it and some IMO.
I'm just happy as shit being able to scroll through presets in Kore like you would on a workstation synth, that alone sold me.
Which brings up why the fuck did Ableton switch to that 'productivity killing browser based double click..... oops I opened up another of the same dammed effect instead of browsing presets' way of searching presets????

I'm actually on v.2 software, v.1 hardware & in fairness I am a lot more impressed this time round... although I think that even though they gave themselves a few extra months for completion it's nowhere near finished (currently it likes to corrupt my old sounds just for kicks) - I know what you mean about Komplete (I have v.5) but the downside of having over ten THOUSAND sounds to me is that my brain isn't comfortable with the whole thing until I have it setup MY way - custom pages, reasonably accurate attributes & crap/irrelevant sounds pruned out etc - that's across the whole system.

Now that Kore 2 comes with the audio engines (so people can get an idea of what the library can do) I think people without Komplete will get a more tightly integrated system WAY more quickly than the likes of me, but that's just because I want to take advantage of Komplete as much as possible (and why not - when you actually sit down and look at it the potential is staggering...).

That probably comes off more as a fanboy post than a regrettable purchase, but I suppose it's really a luv/hät relationship.

Re: the preset scrolling - yeah that is infinitely cooler now that it's synced up to the on-screen browser, but I will never understand why they removed the filesystem browser from the hardware interface. That was the only way you could mouselessly load sounds

... that's a BAD NI!!!

what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

VG8 Roland