Hartmann bankruptcy

rnp · Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 55 Location: germany

Hartmann, the synthesizer manufacturer, is about to go belly up. Schlafhorst, the hardware manufacturer building the Hartmann synthesizers illegally sold their stock of Hartmann gear directly to two Music stores at far below market price to compensate for outstanding payments from Hartmann that were under negotiation at the time. These 450 Neuron VS units were sold to Musicstore Köln and some other online music store who sold them for €150 each (I think they were about €800 new). This naturally annoyed Hartmann's distributors and disrupted the pricing structure of the synth. Hartmann in turn sold their last 50 Neuron VS units to Thomann music store for the same price to pay for a lawsuit against Schlafhorst (the owner of Thomann rejected the cheap offer by the hardware manufacturer). They hope that they can save the company..

Here's a link to the full text (in german) on their homepage: http://www.hartmann-music.com/home/de/news/

It's sad to see a small company go down like this, but it seems there were some real problems with their products as well - apparently they outsourced mostly everything to contractors that didn't deliver in the end.

The Neuron VS is going for a little over €150 on ebay now.. I'm very tempted, even though it's supposed to be buggy as hell.

mosc · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 6:10 pm Post subject:

It may be buggy but it may be a collectors item too. Idea

dasz · Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 10:22 pm Post subject:

What ??? This sux !!! VSTi and piracy are killing the true innovators ...

Technology/Progress is not always a good thing ...

Down with the mouse and keyboard ... knobs and buttons and bliky lights rule ...

/Dasz

spanky@work · Joined: Nov 23, 2004 Posts: 19 Location: STHLM/Sweden

Preach it borther!

seraph · Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2005 9:21 am Post subject: Re: Hartmann bankruptcy

elektro80 · Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 6:21 pm Post subject:

Is the Neuron VS so damned buggy it is actually ununsable? It runs on Tiger? Will work ok with Logic Pro?

It is too bad Hartmann is in trouble. This reminds me of what happened to Waldorf.

elektro80 · Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 7:06 pm Post subject:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr05/articles/hartmannneuronvs.htm

Interesting.

rnp · Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 55 Location: germany

The SOS link only works for subscribers it seems. Hartmann also took the text off of their german homepage now, seems it was written a little prematurely - I was surprised that they'd disclose that much information when liquidation and/or lawsuits were about to happen.

I just bought a Neuron VS on ebay for 190 Euro and will give my impressions here. I hope it works stable enough to sample its output, not getting my hopes up to use it as a "regular" AU.

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 4:44 am Post subject:

AU? You will be using this on a mac then. Which one?

rnp · Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 55 Location: germany

I have a 3rd gen Powerbook G4 800 (which the Neuron VS probably won't run on in the first place) and a 2x2.5 Ghz G5 desktop as main workstation. Logic Pro 6.4.3 and Live 5.0.2 as main hosts.. but I read that the Neuron VS has troubles running in Live.

seraph · Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 8:44 am Post subject: Re: Hartmann bankruptcy