agree with what's said above, all of it.
still think Roland could probably cash in by making exact replicas of their old products, based on their own legacy. they could and perhaps should have done it back in the 90's when this little toys that were, indeed, prodution flops and commercial failures back in the day for Roland, were being sought after because more and more people were starting to make electronic music with all these new genres that were emerging: like detroit's techno, the dance scene in europe (mostly trance and house) and the rave scene all around, and goa trance of course...
Back then there's people already saying they were missing the oportunity to sell big and give these products a bigger and wider life spawn and reach. They totally missed it, and their line of products has been boring as hell ever since, to be honest. Nothing exciting has come out of those labs in a long long time. So why would this be any different?
There's a thing that immediately got my attention that I didn't see mentioned both here and other foruns. As simple as this: one of the advantages of a Virus versus some mono analogue of this new analogue spring is in its depth! It's expensive to build a poly analogue, expensive to build a multi-mode filter, let alone a pair of them, it's certainly not feasable to include a 16 slot mod matrix inside such analogue machines, unless costumers are paying the big buck for them, right? We all know this: digital offers more options, can sound just as good or nearly as good, but also has a lot of tricks of it's own and depth to compensate for the lack of randomness and agressive component distortion and that kind of thing...
But look at those pictures again: Roland isn't trying to come up with a VA that would presumably compete with the Virus, Nord Lead, Ultranova, so forth and so on, no... They're coming up with a keyboard whose interface resembles the SH 101 (or Bass station 2 or similar machines), but it's digital. That means: let's all hope this new VIRTUAL ANALOGUE technology of theirs is really all that much - if any of you even consider they could possibly do a better job at it then Access or U-he on that department - but with stripped down specs, like if it were analogue. And what about Gaia? Isn't that sort like their new SH-101? Also a very simple VA that sounds nothing like Roland's older SH synths, but manages to fail on offering more options then your cheap "analogue spring" mono synth does. Easy enough: Roland RIP!
EDIT:
I'm willing to bet that due to this future failure from Roland, XOXBOX will keep on selling big along with TB303 software emulations. Let's see if this Synth1 will leave up to a direct comparison against Lush 101 or Tal Noise's 101. And Acidlab can keep selling their miami 808 and rest assured this was all but a rumor and Roland isn't going to come up with real analogue machines anymore, so they can keep doing their thing... I mean, how lame is it that if I want the classic Roland sound I can easily get it in Euro Rack when the original company is doing workstations and lame stuff that nobody wants?
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