Bacchus wrote:paul_ wrote:Yes, the very type of obscure and useless stuff that sank them, very illustrative Fakir. My point was that they really were just a guitar pedal company, whereas now they have cast a considerably wider net on audio processing gear.
I suspect (without having been around in the 70s and 80s and without thinking about it too much) that the divisions between "guitar effects" and "audio processing" are a fair bit blurrier now. So now their weird guitar pedals are less weird guitar pedals and more interesting audio devices that will end up being used all over the place. Maybe.
It's true that more non-guitarists have use for guitar pedals now, (but that's nothing new, tons of synth players used guitar pedals in the early '80s right around the time EHX went out of business, and most exciting guitar effects from reverb/echo/wah onwards were borne of use of non-guitar equipment with one, a tradition which has continued into the synth and usb-midi eras), but form factor is an equal part of what I meant. When you homage a legacy-design outboard microphone preamp or limiting amplifier that has no phono inputs on it, I don't think too many guitarists are going to be rushing to stick velcro all over it and ditch a couple Boss pedals to make room. Picturing an NY-2A robroe demo that is funny ON PURPOSE is quite a challenge, we'd end up with the assessment that it's a VCR-sized DS-1 for vocalists or something.
EHX nonetheless make a lot more stuff guitarists doing guitar-pedal-amp stuff wouldn't have much use for these days than ever before, and are upfront about it. Even when they made a rack unit back in the '70s or '80s it was just a guitar pedal built into that form-factor (like the emphatically-named "Guitar Synthesizer" rack unit which was just a huge Microsynth, or various delays which were also sold in pedal format), whereas now they have properly designated outboard recording gear and step sequencers with MIDI control and all that. They're actively trying to make stuff for other markets.
Admittedly, they would likely have hit on some of this stuff in the '80s if they hadn't folded (aiming more at synthy soundtrack dudes getting their John Carpenter on, and live rock keyboardists), but they didn't. They have the benefit of the (more versatile) laptop/usb-midi market to aim it at now, not just guitar and live keyboard players. The boutique world created huge demand for designs which, at the end of the day, aren't that hard or expensive to build... this doesn't just go for 5 flavors of Big Muff, but recording buffs into the big oft-ripped designs like the 1176 and LA-2A, and even home audiophiles. They sell plenty of tubes to the hi-fi dudes, under both the EHX and Sovtek brands (because Matthews's New Sensor Corp owns both, as aen pointed out).
TL;DR Guitarists being just as confused about a new EHX unit as they were in the early '80s doesn't make it the same scenario, in my opinion. They're probably in a much safer place now, even without getting into the New Sensor angle.
The only thing going out of fashion faster than guitar pedals in the early '80s these days is... well... guitar in general. EHX don't seem blind to this, though.
And those disco coke necklaces would sell like fucking hotcakes nowadays, especially if they accepted low-impedance and line level equally well.
(she/they)
