TI Snow discontinued

[Timo]

If anyone wants to buy a new Snow, get one while stocks last.

Virus support staff have confirmed that the TI Snow has now been discontinued.

Guess second hand Snow prices may rise slightly as a result.

[boreg]

I wonder if it a sign of something new coming soon, or Kemper Audio being on the way out of the synth market altogether.

[evilgus]

I'd put my money on a slow wind-down of all Virus products, but I'd love to be proven wrong! I've seen similar behaviour in the IT and Corporate world, when companies get taken over. Buy the company for the engineering know-how and intellectual property, milk the profits for a while, keep on a skeleton support staff to reduce costs, then let all the stock run out and sell off remaining assets. If I'm right, that would be why there's "No Comment" from the Access support guys, when asked about enhancements or new products, as they have no intention of doing any further development. (Possibly a Non-Disclosure Agreement, as part of the company purchase.)

Who knows, maybe the rights to the Virus O.S code might come up for sale, in future, but I imagine it would be pricey! 😳

Still Evil

[MBTC]

In small companies, it's not uncommon for employees to remain hushed about everything other than that which is officially released to press - there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an untimely information leak.

Its difficult to speculate about why the Snow is dropped from the lineup. I can make a number of guesses, but have no reason to feel any one of my guesses is more valid than another.

It was likely their product with the lowest profit margin, and it's one that would benefit from initially higher sales (due to lower entry cost), but at some point sales would likely plateau. If manufacturing labor or parts costs continued to increase, and there weren't ongoing to sales to support it, the item with the lowest margin would likely be the first to go.

Sometimes the presence of a value offering in a lineup cannibalizes the sales off the more premium version, so it could be that.

Or it could be that they are finally doing an overhaul of the product lineup so the last one in will be the first one out and all of them will be replaced by a new synth?

Only possible theories at this point. Sometimes products with the lowest margin are dropped simply as a simplicity of operations move.

[recursion loop]

Its difficult to speculate about why the Snow is dropped from the lineup. I can make a number of guesses, but have no reason to feel any one of my guesses is more valid than another.

It was likely their product with the lowest profit margin, and it's one that would benefit from initially higher sales (due to lower entry cost), but at some point sales would likely plateau. If manufacturing labor or parts costs continued to increase, and there weren't ongoing to sales to support it, the item with the lowest margin would likely be the first to go.

Sometimes the presence of a value offering in a lineup cannibalizes the sales off the more premium version, so it could be that.

Or it could be that they are finally doing an overhaul of the product lineup so the last one in will be the first one out and all of them will be replaced by a new synth?

Only possible theories at this point. Sometimes products with the lowest margin are dropped simply as a simplicity of operations move.

From the end user's standpoint, Snow is essentially a plugin in the box, it competes with other plugins which are not tied to dedicated boxes, run unlimited instances in realtime and are several times cheaper. Whether or not Virus engine offers any sonic advantages compared to current plugins is disputable, but many ITB producers think that it doesn't, especually now, when there are Spire and others.

On the other hand, bigger Viruses have a full-blown hardware controller surface and thus have all advantages of hardware. For those who mostly uses hardware synths Snow may be of little interest because of the very limited control surface.

Thus, Snow is bacisally too expencive for what it does for most ITB guys, and too limited hardware-wise for the OTB ones. Therefore I see why it may have been not very successful product in last few years.

Having thus said, I'm a very happy Snow owner.

[Berni]

This has been on the cards for some time now. Supplies of the snow have pretty much dried up on places like Sweetwater quite a while ago.