MATRIXSYNTH: Pics of The ARP Centaur VI Polyphonic Guitar Synthesizer System

This is a follow-up to this post from earlier today. See that post for another possible one-off ARP guitar synth (not the Avatar).

Vincent found the following two pics of the ARP Centaur VI.

Left via the VSE forums: "I think there was 2 ARP Centaur VI built. It would have cost about $20K had it hit the markets, but it was hopelessly unreliable. This is the only photo I know of: a former employee of there custom engineering dept. Has anyone seen a better picture?"

Below via gearslutz:

"Just scanned this pic out of an old guitar book my brother had - the prototype ARP Centaur VI polyphonic guitar system. Two prototypes were built but the second one is unaccounted for.

The Centaur never went to production for two reasons. One, the technology of the mid 70s wasn't advanced enough to realize a reliable pitch-to-voltage converter and they couldn't get consistent tracking from a guitar. Two, they used a brute force approach for a polyphonic system - they crammed 115 circuit boards into the thing. Very expensive approach and it ultimately proved to be unreliable - Al Pearlman did a failure analysis and concluded that the mean time between failures was two hours. It was impossible to keep it running.

The project was dropped in favor of a simpler monophonic guitar synth - the Avatar was simply an Odyssey with the keyboard system replaced by a monophonic pitch-to-voltage converter. But they still couldn't perfect the converter, the tracking from a guitar was extremely glitchy, and you had to use a extremely clean picking technique. Between the Centaur and the pitch-to-voltage converter problems, ARP sank a HUGE amount of R&D revenue into these systems.

The not-ready-for-prime-time Avatar was rushed into production. Guitar players balked at the $3000 price tag and unreliable tracking. Avatars sold poorly, dealers blew out unsold units at bargain prices, and Avatars were discontinued after one year of production. ARP never recovered the R&D investment, they dug a very deep hole in which they only recovered $1m sales revenue from a $7m R&D investment."