As promised, here is a brief review of what we learned from our three month flood of Polyphony questionnaires. I must say, I was surprised at the high rate of response, as nearly every questionnaire sent out was returned. Unfortunately, we weren't too clear about how we wanted you to rate new product ideas and Polyphony material. Therefore, some people used numbers twice, left spaces blank, and so on. This would throw off the statistics if I went down the line and added up the individual scores, so I will give a very generalized overview of the trends seen in reading the responses (yes, believe it or not, about four of us have read every questionnaire received).

First, concerning Polyphony, the overwhelming favorite was technical articles, including Lab Notes. A close second was new product reports. Perhaps in the future we can get other companies interested in sending us reports on their new products. I would like to see this, and I would have done it already if someone would have sent me something. We want to print anything we can get our hands on that deals with electronic music in any way. Ranking about middle was the Patches section. I was surprised that people didn't rate this higher, having thought from the beginning that this was one of the more popular sections.

After that, the other sections all rated about the same; Random Noise, Spotlight, Reviews, Advertising, etc.

New product ideas weren't as clearly divided (at first, anyway). After we had received 400 or 500 replies, I went back through them to try to decide what you guys wanted. Then I saw what was happening. The dividing line wasn't between certain products, but groups, or types, of products. When reading the new product ratings in conjunction with "How you use the equipment" and "Other equipment owned", I could see that our customers are divided into musicians and electronic hobbyists. In the performance oriented group, equal weight fell on units such as string synthesizers, drum synthesizers, mixing consoles, normalized synthesizers, and so on. The electronic madmen were interested in the more obscure products: computer interfaces, human voice synthesizers, etc. If there was an overlapping area, it was the digital polyphonic keyboard/controller. I suppose the hobbyists are more interested in this for the newer and more complex technologies involved, while the musicians are most interested in how easy and versatile the technology will make their job.

In summation, you can be watching for: an increasing amount of Polyphony being devoted to technical articles, digital work (including programming), and some new products along the lines of a flanger, solid state echo units, string synthesizers, computer peripherals for music, and perhaps (but this would take a while) a modular mixing console and different types of modules for it. Polyphony will be the first place we mention most of our new products, so keep scanning our pages if you are interested in getting an early announcement about some of these things. And continue to send us your ideas for new products.

From the "Last Minute Department" - Does anyone out there have an interest in video synthesizers, or stage lighting and special effects (like lasers)? Just curious.