This is NAMM week which means many music gear announcements. NAMM is happening somewhere in United States but most interesting gear announcements come from Germany. I will get to them later. Biggest announcement was done in NAMM and it wasn’t the gear which made announcement big it was what announcing the gear means. Roland announced the first Midi 2.0 midi keyboard. Big thing is it is the first Midi 2.0 product on the market. I tried to find more information about Midi 2.0 but it seems like there isn’t official announcement of specification yet. Roland being part of party which makes the specification felt confident enough to release first Midi 2.0 product. I assume Roland can make keyboard Midi 2.0 compatible with firmware update when specification is announced.
I didn’t mention the name of the keyboard. It isn’t important unless you have to know the name of the first product in future but I assume you go to Wikipedia before coming here in that case. What is big deal in this is current digitally controlled gear don’t come obsolete but it is hard to justify buying expensive Midi 1.0 gear when Midi 2.0 is around the corner. Midi 2.0 brings many improvements to midi standard. Biggest change is change of resolution. With Midi 1.0 resolution is limited to 128 steps. When you turn knobs there are only 128 possible values. Midi 2.0 gives you from 65536 to around 4 billion possible values. Now ask yourself why would you want to spend lot of money for something which controls have 128 value resolution when you can get in couple years something which controls have resolution of over 65000. This is bigger change than change front standard definition to high definition in televisions.
Midi 1.0’s resolution limit is big reason why we buy analogically controlled gear which only takes notes and mod wheel with midi resolution. Midi 2.0 gives close to similar resolution to digitally controlled gear and software. Midi 2.0’s resolution might be the thing that let software and digital synths to take last step to what makes analog gear superior. Then there are calculation requirements and analog components reactions to heat and other things to go but those are matter of computing power.
Currently Roland’s keyboard is only thing supporting Midi 2.0 but it means Midi 2.0 changed from something that might be coming in the future to something that is already here. You can use it with Midi 1.0 gear. DAWs and synths need to implement Midi 2.0 before it comes better than Midi 1.0 controllers. I wonder how well all digitally controlled gear will sell after Roland’s announcement. It might not be possible to add higher resolution to gear which was designed to work with Midi 1.0 specification. NAMM had couple interesting synth announcements but I don’t care about them because of Midi 2.0 is coming. I only care about analogically controlled hardware until Midi 2.0 resolution gear comes out. This is good time to release analogically controlled gear.
I started to wonder if someone in Behringer saw this coming. To my knowledge they have only one digitally controlled synth Deepmind. You can argue if different Deepmind synths are same or different synths. It was their first synth. After that there has been only analogically controlled synths. Someone there is really smart if they have planned for this moment when coming of Midi 2.0 halts sales of digitally controlled synths. Their competition is basically Korg with couple ARP models, Arturia’s Mini- and Microbrutes, smaller boutique manufacturers and eurorack.
And this is the time when Behringer goes eurorack. Biggest gear announcement of the week was Behringer’s eurorack modules based on Roland’ System 100m and Moog’s System 55. Some argue these are too big but they give you eurorack versions of legendary modular synths with really good price. Roland made their eurorack version earlier. You can get Behringer’s version with half the price. Moog made System 55 reissue which costed about 30000 euros. You can get Behringer’s eurorack system with about 1000 euros. All in all Behringer’s modules cost about half or less than competing modules. This will change price of eurorack systems in near future.
I am not sure if Behringer even bothered to go to NAMM. Announcements were made from their premises. But they have won this year’s NAMM even with some announcements still to come.