Keira-WitherKay
hows this. ........... my reverb unit of many years dies on me........... after great service and countless gigs and travels ........ so no prob with that ...nothing lasts forever .........
so i need a compact reverb unit for my mix ..........
to my amazement i find out that reverb units are seemingly the most expensive effect to buy ...so i look around...and even think hey i can use a reverb pedal even...cos i only use it amazingly sparingly in my mix and on a simple room patch ..almost unnoticeable in fact .....and when i mic my guitar i don't use reverb at all .........
so i wasn't prepared to spend a fortune on this.... and thought yeah there must be something on market i could get .........
then it gets funny ............
cos i get offered a whole new mixing desk with 24bit reverb and other fx delay/flange/mod/pitch shift built onboard for about R 1000 LESS than i could get a boss rv 5 for ........ so now i bought a new mixer to get my reverb ..... and it cost me less for the package as for single pedal ...surely someone should plug that hole in market and offer affordable and simple reverb ala Alesis microverb (which i was using before)
but anyway i just found it funny i could buy a new mixer with 24bit reverb for less than a pedal.... sure i got excellent discount on mixer but hey all i needed was a reverb unit ................. retail is a funny biz...........
DonovanB
I guess it's supply and demand.
It's like saying a Boss 1 second delay is longer than an ibanez 1 second delay which is better than the Digitech 1 second delay. They are all 1 second...
Guitarists are willing to pay top dollar for the brand, or to say it was made in a certain country or that it is totally unique or boutique.
vic
I am not in the music retail business so I am not really clued up about the workings of such. However what is as clear as daylight is the fact that there are too many gadgets and stuff around ....because of the diversity of these things, it's sooo easy to take customers (especially the uninformed and those with GAS) for a nice looong ride. It's quite evident when one reads about all the Fx pedals in the arsenals of some players....? Things are not simple anymore. ☹
Bob-Dubery
Two things I want to throw into the mix here.
1) The proliferation of brands and options is a GOOD thing. Competing products are not necessarily copies of each other offering the same quality and features and sound. I have been thinking about a loop station type pedal - there are different offerings, they are not all the same, and they all have their cons and, in most cases, their pros. A while back I was looking for a chorus type pedal. Again there are different offerings with different numbers of knobs and - believe it 'cos it's true - different sounds (the Carl Martin. for instance, does not sound the same as the Boss)
2) Some companies are innovators. They typically do a lot of R&D and R&D costs money. Some companies are copiers - which is a much cheaper way of operating.
Keira-WitherKay
mmm yeah i agree with all above posts but my original point was.if they can make a 24 bit reverb/multi fx unit available on a mixing desk and sell the whole package that cheap that it's cheaper than a boss RV5 why don't they package just the reverb unit as a stand alone unit and sell it at a fraction of the price cos surely the 4 mic preamps an 4 extra stereo channels ect ect all costs money too .....so surely i'm not the only person out there looking for just that hint of reverb meaning i don't need a dedicated studio unit since it's purely for a hint of 'space" live and this reverb is by far all i wanted in 1st place so surely sell it as a stand alone uit for a fraction of the cost ?? but anyway too late now deals done and i'm not dissatisfied to have another desk ......... one always can use spares....
AlanRatcliffe
It's not the retail side of the business, it's the manufacturing side. The nature of mass production means that the more they make, the cheaper each unit becomes. They sell far more mixers with built-in effects than they do stand-alone effects units these days, so they are cheaper to produce.
You also need to make sure you are comparing apples to apples - a Behringer mixer is in a completely different price range to an Alesis, Roland or Mackie one. To get a meaningful comparison you'd have to compare the price of an Alesis Mixer with built in FX to an Alesis standalone FX unit, or a Behringer mixer with a Behringer FX unit.
Finally, the built-in FX units sported by many mixers these days are fairly limited beasts when compared to stand alone units - not just in features, but often in sound quality too. There is a lot more to the quality of a unit than bit depth and sampling frequency, not all 24 bit, 48kHz A/D and D/A converters are created equal and the better ones can add a significant cost to a unit. Pretty much like if you compare specs of different guitars, they can both look the same on paper, but two guitars with spruce tops and rosewood back (for instance) can vary widely in quality and price.
