When Gear Becomes “Legacy”

Later in my studio redesign, I started thinking about building a stand for the AKAI Advance49 — a keyboard controller that, as it turns out, is no longer in production. That thought led me down a familiar path.

The Korg Prologue? No longer in production.
The M-Audio ProjectMix? Discontinued.
The Nektar P1? Discontinued.
The Maschine Jam sitting in front of me as I write this? Also discontinued.
The Novation VRM Box — or whatever the exact name was — gone.
Even several ART units I own, like the TransX, TransY, and Studio Control, appear to be on ART’s legacy list.

Once you start noticing it, the list gets long very quickly.

And I think that realization played a bigger role in my move toward hardware than I initially understood.

There’s something comforting about owning a piece of equipment for a long time — learning it deeply, being happy with it, and not worrying about whether a manufacturer will continue to support the software required just to make it function. That feeling of “I’ve got it, and you can’t take it away from me” is surprisingly refreshing.

Take the M-Audio ProjectMix as an example. When I bought it, it retailed for around $1,200. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. If I connect it to my old 2012 Mac Pro — which, of course, is also no longer supported — both work exactly as they did when they were new.

And yet, they sit there largely unusable.

Not because they’re broken.
Not because they stopped doing what they were designed to do.
But because software support moved on.

When you look around your own studio, are there pieces you loved that simply vanished? Products that didn’t fail — they were just abandoned?

My first synth in this studio redesign was the Yamaha MODX7. Yamaha later released the MODX+, and now the MODX M. They can do whatever they like — and that’s fine. But my MODX7 still works perfectly. Even if Yamaha were to discontinue the DAW plugin that recalls settings (which would admittedly be inconvenient), the instrument itself would still be fully functional.

There’s something deeply satisfying about that.

The Novation VRM Box didn’t stop working because it was poorly designed. The software simply stopped being developed. There are modern replacements that do similar things — but that product is gone.

At some point, I got tired of buying controllers meant to emulate hardware, only to replace them two or three years later with another controller meant to emulate hardware. The cycle just kept repeating.

Yes, my math is off — hardware costs far more than most mid-level controllers. I’m aware of that. But the trade-off, for me, was longevity.

Instead of the ProjectMix, I now use a Zoom L-20 — a digital mixer, multitrack recorder, and class-compliant audio interface. It doesn’t have motorized faders like the ProjectMix did, but it doesn’t rely on proprietary software to exist. It works on its own terms.

Of course, hardware isn’t immune to failure. Things can break. Parts can become unavailable. Repairs aren’t always possible. But the hope — and it is a hope — is that the shelf life of these devices is longer than some of the tools I invested in that became obsolete by decision rather than by design.

That sense of permanence, or at least relative permanence, was a big part of what drew me toward hardware. Not because it’s better. Not because it’s necessary. But because, this time around, I wanted tools that could grow old with me.