AVID Selling M-Audio and Pinnacle Lines!!!

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by Jay_uk

+1

IIRC Avid had to curtail M-Audio,s efforts, as they surprised everyone with the profire 2626. They ended up competing with their own products.
The Axiom pro is great keyboard with excellent integration.
Hope those guys at M-Audio continue to work their magic.

It wasn't like that. M-audio was making money every quarter while Avid was losing money every quarter. So Gary basically merged M-Audio into Avid so he could use M-Audio's profits to offset Avid's loses on paper. And at the same time he gutted a lot of the M-Audio employees thinking "hey, an engineer is an engineer. A Tech support person is a tech support person." Which totally made the transition even harder and brought a lot of the M-Audio products to a halt. But they did actually keep the guy who designed the 2626 hardware. I'm not sure if he's still there. But I know he designed some of the new Avid audio interfaces we see now as well as some that haven't been released yet.

[digidesigner]

Sad to see Air instruments on the list as well... so no more VI development I guess...

[nst7]

I didn't even see that part. That's even more interesting. But that could be positive. The AIR instruments will continue to be made for Protools, but it could be that we also see those things for other platforms. Great for composers who want to use these in Logic, DP, etc.

It could also mean that Avid is going to develop VI's in-house, which could be a whole different ballgame.


On the other subject of aquisitions, it seems like one of the problems they have is when they buy a company, it mainly seems to benefit Protools users, but nobody else. I'm thinking of Euphonix, M-Audio, and AIR specifically. That's not going to make as much money. The whole point of buying a company is to grow your market share and take it to another level, in most cases (the exception being Apple, who just integrates it into their own stuff).

For example, buy Euphonix, improve it, and keep marketing it to everyone, increasing market share.

In the case of AIR instruments, they could have made those available in AU and VST for other people to use. This seems to work out well for MOTU. They make a DAW, but make stuff for other platforms as well.

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by nst7

I think selling the divisions will be good in the long run, as they seemed to have a lot of confusing overlap of products. I think the original idea was to have these entry level products get people interested to move up to the professional products, but they never seemed to get that part right.

Maybe, but at the same time, avid has not much of a choice to bring something comparable to a 003 now. They had the project mix which could do the job well into pt 11, with selling M-audio (and no news if they are keeping the pmio for themselves as they did for the fast track) they are losing that substitution for the 003.

Guess we'll have to see.

..but at the same time, again for all profits..Has anyone see how much they sold the line for? All I've seen in their press release is how much they save with the move of the M-Audio / consumer video employees?

[TCM]

These news don't breed trust...at least for me!

What is this...a new beginning.....or the beginning of the end.


Are they going to be a highly specialized niche player?


There have definitely been some confusing signals over the years!


In the end, who's going to hurt.....the customer????

Time will tell!

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by digidesigner

Sad to see Air instruments on the list as well... so no more VI development I guess...

Hold on to your shirt

The acquisitions also signal a new relationship with Avid. The AIR Software Group will continue to develop and maintain technologies for the Avid Pro Tools family of digital audio workstations, and a number of M-Audio products will continue to include Pro Tools software. Select Akai Professional and Alesis products will also now include Pro Tools, bringing the leading professional production software to a whole new audience of musicians, producers, and engineers.

From http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/jac...132600537.html

Not so blight after all.

[dr sound]

In today's Avid news:
"Avid also plans to reduce the number of its employees as it streamlines operations, with approximately 20% of its permanent employee base impacted by the divestitures and headcount reduction plans. The company currently expects to incur a restructuring charge of approximately $19 to $23 million related to these actions and other associated measures."

Here is a link to the whole article:
http://www.avid.com/US/press-room/Av...nes-Operations

and this news:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/avid-t...20120702-00689

[ronwasserman]

Not really worried about this, but it's been obvious for some time that Avid has been having substantial problems.

Read this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...etsNews&rpc=43

[digidesigner]

When Peter Gorges left, it was a sign that Avid will milk the AIR Instuments for a bit more, but will dump it. So I guess the decision we see publicly today was done @ 2009 when Peter left.

I'm sad to see the VI side dumped, but I'm more worried who is going to do all the programming for TDM plugins to become AAX-DSP? I NEED MY ECHO FARM IN AAX-DSP!!!

[filosofem]

Originally Posted by Shan

That should've been done years ago in my opinion.

It's also of my opinion that AIR Group should have ported their Virtual Instrument Plug-In range to include VST and AU plug-in formats when Avid 'opened' Pro Tools.