In the field of hi-tech musical instruments, as in just about any other area that involves microchip technology, prices are plummeting. Five years ago, Roland were selling a non-programmable, six-voice analogue polyphonic synth for a little under £1000. Five years before that, they were selling a preset, monophonic synth for a similar amount of money. Now, on the threshold of 1986, a thousand of the British coins that have come closest to looking like chocolate money since the old threepenny bit will buy you a digital programmable polyphonic synth, an analogue voice expander for it, and a multitrack polyphonic sequencer to drive both of them.

At first glance, it looks as though there can only be one reaction to this sequence of events: it's good news. It has to be. It means more people than ever, from more walks of life than ever, can start to appreciate the flexibility of electronic music synthesis by gaining first-hand experience of it themselves. There are still, even in Britain, a large number of people who believe all synthesisers are vast, sprawling telephone exchanges, impossible to use, impossible to play, and impossible to pay for. But those people are far fewer in number now than they were only a few years ago, largely because the huge drop in the price of high technology has given us low-cost, professional-sounding gear like that just mentioned.

Thanks to the downward price spiral, young people of both sexes and all backgrounds have come to see the synthesiser as a viable, 'pop' alternative to learning the electric guitar, banging an unwieldy set of drums, or getting throat disorders by trying to sing out of range in front of an over-enthusiastic backing band. Despite the efforts of the rock 'n' roll revivalists, electronics are alive and well and playing a bigger role in the development of popular music than ever before. And they will continue to do that until such time as the technology, for whatever reason, stops being cheap to buy.

But stop and think for a moment. Think back, if you can, to something synth composer Vangelis said when E&MM interviewed him just over a year ago. At the time, he was lamenting the lack of excitement inherent in the design of current synthesisers, and expressed sorrow that nobody had ever taken one specific synthesiser, and given it the same time to develop that people gave the pianoforte two centuries ago.

In one sense, Vangelis' argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The synthesiser as a genre, though not one particular model, has been the subject of continuing development in much the same way that several different versions of the piano evolved at more or less the same time.

But he has a point. The MiniMoog, that grand old daddy of the 'affordable' (£1200) synthesiser generation, was given a production life of over a decade. The Prophet 5, in its own way just as influential as the Moog, was given five years. Today, a synth is lucky if it lasts a year in production, followed by another three to six months on dealers' shelves, depreciating steadily as its replacement starts to become available.

This is a sad state of affairs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's all too easy to spend £3000 on hi-tech music gear, only to find that a couple of years later, a third of that sum buys something appreciably better. In the world we live in now, hi-tech becomes mid-tech with alarming speed.

So there are two sides to the cost-reduction coin. The first is that it spreads the cause of musical democracy with more pace than any political movement will ever manage, but the second is that buying something at a low price can only ever have short-term benefits. Things aren't genuinely good value unless that value is lasting. Which, these days, isn't very often.

For everybody involved in using hi-tech instruments to make music, the future is never anything other than uncertain — perhaps that's part of the technology's appeal. The only thing we can confidently say about the shape of things to come is that, whatever you buy in 1986, it'll be substantially less than the same money will get you in 1988.