Quote:
Originally Posted by MBTC
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.
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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.