Hi all,
i spoke to several retail stores in my city, trying desparately to hunt down a CMC-TP.
i talked to a few of them about how great the CMC’s are and how gutted i was that they were dis-continued.
I had the response from a few of them that “the CMC’s were just not that popular man…we didnt sell many.” i was shocked the first time i heard this but after the 3rd time i have come to realize this was probably true.
personally as a Cubase user since the Atari, i dreamed of such a great, solid, cheap little controller that had the Cubase transport and function buttons split out so elegantly. As far as i am concerned they are exactly the product i always wanted, and BLOODY GENIUS.
all i can think of is that the problem with sales is either:
a) kids who do mashups on their laptops dont want ANYTHING plugged into their USBs. no keyboards, no nothing, because it just makes it harder to produce on the bus to school. Everything has to be inside the screen or dont bother.
b) the CMC’s are limited to Steinberg (Nuendo/Cubase) and as a controller, this splits their market into 1/5 of possible sales (or even 1/6). Useless to anyone using Ableton, of which there are a lot. So sales were always going to be smaller unless they became universal controllers at some stage (which they didnt). instead of deleting these awsome controllers, Steinberg should have released universal drivers for other DAWs and they would have boosted their sales for years onwards further down the road…but sadly no.
c) Customers STILL REMEMBER how they were burnt by Steinberg with their hardware in the past (eg Midex?), dropping support after they were discontinued…no more drivers. So customers looked at these and said “yeah right…and Cubase x comes out and they dont work any more”. If only the Steinberg board of directors saw further down the line than past their own jobs about things like this. I believe that Steinberg have seen the error of their ways (hopefully) and that they wont make the same mistakes again. I sincerely hope they understand the consequences and support the CMCs for a long time. But the damage has already been done from years of abuse in regards to this to some degree unfortunately and its going to take a long time to prove themselves again that they do stand by their hardware.
d) they were making no profit on these little gems because they were too expensive to produce for what the market competition showed it could bear?
e) they have a new CMC V2.0 controller coming out soon and they are just clearing this old stock first and an even better CMC collection is coming that is going to blow us all away?
i only wish we knew the real reason. Meanwhile, im DOUBLING DOWN on these little beauties and getting a second one of ALL of them that i can find, as backup for a rainy day when another USB hub exploding incident might occur! (i wish i had started my exploration for a 2nd unit of each earlier tho!)
anyone have any solid clues as to what happened here and why?
Cheers,
Blackout