click cykong posted the following history of Braintec, Touched By Sound and MAM taken from the AH archives. As it originally came from the archives I decided to post it in full here as well. Be sure to check out ckong for more images and more synth content in general.
The following was posted on AH in October 2000 by Michael from Touched by Sound:
"I don't really like talking too much about the 'old' days, but also I think some things should be pointed out right, what is said about MAM and TBS.
In 1993 TBS met Stefan Schmidt. I had the idea of making a rackmount TB-303 clone and a nice rack vocoder. My partner (who had the money) founded a company called Braintec that year.
Braintec developed and manufactured the Transistorbass-3, which was a very good clone plus a lot more features. TBS distributed this product, and approx. 400 pieces were made.
I split up with my partner and so did Stefan.
20 miles from here there was a small company called MAM (Music And More) which was making little rack mixers and amps and gadgets like that. Not very well known, but cheap stuff and useful. We put Stefan together with them and they started designing a lot of products with some of our ideas and co-designs. First of all: they made a cheap version of the Transistorbass3, which was of course the MAM MB33 bass synthesizer. Then the VF11 vocoder and so on.
That year I said I would like to do distribution worldwide for the product.
Because of TBS being a retailer and shops probably would not buy from an opponent - we finally decided to call it Music And More distribution, first as a subdivision of TBS, a year later, as independent limited company. We sold more than 5000 MB33 and more than 2000 VF11 worldwide. Not bad, for a small company!
Last year my partner and one of the owners of MAM (manufacturer) didn't get on anymore so they just stopped supplying us. They had big problems with financing the production and lack of quality. Stefan was tied up for 1 year developing the SQ16 sequencer and the market was longing for new products from MAM.
We found a small company near us manufacturing tube-preamps and similar stuff. They were also analog freaks and had an much better quality production. I started designing many products with them and we badged them as MAM. At that time we mad the first run of DRM1's. I think 100 pieces came onto the market as MAM, before we split up.
We redesigned and improved the DRM1 a little and now we make it as TBS. We are currently working on the Mephisto and a Midi-Theremin. I hope I didn=B4t bore you with this excursion. Please feel free to contact me anytime should you require more information.
Best Regards
Michael
on
the PC of
Stefan
TBS"
I wonder how this works in with Vermona since it looks like the TBS DRM1 became the Vermona DRM1mkII.
ReplyDeleteyes, i'm interested in that too. guess they bought the design.
ReplyDeletevery interesting read..i have an sq-16 and Ive been wanting to find out what happened to MAM. Info is extremely hard to find and of course support is non exsistant. need someone to completely rewrite the manual to explain how to get the amazing 'rotate' feature to work......
ReplyDeleteI bought one of the first DRM-1's. Very impressive on paper, but very papery sounding in real life.
ReplyDeleteTBS has a somewhat mixed reputation among dealers (and some customers) in Germany, so healthy scepticism is recommended with stories told from a certain angle...but 1 thing seems sure, the MB 33 was a hot seller, then rebranded at least 3 times.
ReplyDelete