[/quote]In this day and age where everyone uses apps on cell phones, IPads, and desktop DAW’s (plug-ins) the first priority for Eventide was to release a product with a $2000 front control panel for $7000.00. Why? Because if they release a $5000.00 version first nobody would purchase the one for $7000.00. Now, another year must pass before ‘all functionality is available” for the H9000R for one to purchase this cheaper product.
Yeah right!
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Well I, for one, would get the front control panel version. In any case, for my application, a software-only controlled unit is not an option.
I think Eventide / AAgnello’s explanation for the delay is believable. I totally understand that developers are people too. I’m sure they’re all hard at work at Eventide to release this as soon as possible.
But at the same time this new platform is a departure from Eventide’s older architectures in so many ways, that they are surely taking their time to ensure everything is done properly for the long term as you don’t want to invest so much time, effort and money into such an architecture to end up having to re-invest to fix deeply rooted issues later down the road. Or worse, having to go back to the drawing board and work on yet another architecture to replace your latest, just-released-one because that one ended up having been butchered beyond any possible rework during developement.
So kuddos to Eventide in that regard.
I don’t think Eventide owes anyone anything. They can price the units however they want. The pricing is based on their internal metrics and are not influenced by what users post on the internet. The best way to see if they priced it correctly is to look at the sales.
You are right that Eventide doesn’t owes anyone anything.
However I do not agree about a company not being influenced by internet comments. It is quite the contrary in this day and age where marketing is deeply rooted in online interactions, data collection, paid reviewers/commenters etc..
Especially not coming from Eventide users, who are surely not your average Joe discussing how he saved 50 cents by using a coupon at Wally’s (not that there’s anything wrong with that, that being said!!).
I mean we are talking about :
1- specialised professional users and wealthy (or seriously G.A.S.-affected) prosumers,
2- who are discussing a high price, specialty product (an high end processor), inside a specialty segmet (fx processing), of an already specialty market (pro audio).
I am thinking out load here but I think Eventide does pay attention to their user base and/or leverage whatever marketing data they can gather from these forums. Going by their posts I think this thread shows that they clearly do care about their users’ use cases and what not, so why wouldn’t they care about their users’ level of interest in shelling or not shelling out that kind of money, as well?
I am personally waiting for the redux versions with less processing power, as I previously mentionned. I just hope that along with processor power scaling will come the price scaling as well. Because if they release the H9000 at 7K USD, which is too darn expensive in my opinion (no matter how powerful it is), then a redux version with less say half the processing power would still be too expensive at even half the price of 3.5K USD (note: I know such products aren’t priced this way in a linear price scaling fashion, I’m just simplifying things for the sake of demonstrating the point).
So in the end, I just wonder how they are going to pull it out market-wise with this new architecture, with such a pricing strategy, in these days and age of software plugins and existing and upcoming cheaper processors (which I concede might not sound as good nor be as powerful, but sometimes, cheaper equipment can and will do the job and will be close enough). Especially if their material and assembly costs for the front panel controls are so uncontrollably high for some reason as to impair their ability to sell it at a more reasonable price thus slowing down and restricting market penetration. Wich would be really sad for such a nice platform. But hey, that’s only my 2 cents and I might be totally wrong (and in fact I am hoping that I am, because I really like the promises of this platform) 
