No they're not... at least on the clones I have, they nailed it. And yes I have the originals.
It's like people who say that Arturia's VSTs are exactly like the real thing - to which I can only say "Huh???"
Thats quite some... BS. Gillet intented to exit the audio hardware industry in search of different, greener pastures already way before Brains was released. Also MI code is public, so 'cloning' is a stretch. MI designs were and are being produced by multiple shops.
Btw: i hope not just a handful people know the story about Dave Smith fucking over Dave Rossum by one-sidedly deciding to stop payments for E-MUs licensed poly keybed tech:
"But then Sequential Circuits had decided they were no longer going to pay us royalties for the Prophet 5. We called our lawyers, and though we would probably win a lawsuit against them, it would be expensive. The Audity would take several years to produce the kind of revenue we needed for that – could we come up with another product quickly? The Emulator was about to be born."
EMU designed and patented a digitally scanned polyphonic keyboard that was licensed by both Oberheim for the Oberheim 4-Voice and 8-Voice synthesizers and by Sequential Circuits for the Prophet 5.
Source: https://www.amazona.de/interview-dave-rossum-e-mu-part-two-e...
Another thing is that Boog Moog didn't "invent the Theremin or so", he got a foothold by selling (dare to say 'unlicensed'?) kits based on another dudes' invention. Has he ever knowingly paid tribute to Lew Thermen?
I know the designs are open source and produced elsewhere, but it's not unreasonable to wonder if Brains was what finally pushed her over the edge.
https://www.gearnews.com/mutable-instruments-no-new-modules-...
Yes, Gillet has a history announcing ceasing development and production. Just read 'Have we been here before?', and also the last comment.
I bet people already asked Gillet directly if B's announcement contributed. I don't know, a) i don't care about vendor / personality cults, and b) their forums are gone.
Behringer are hit and miss on this. They killed it with their Minimoog clones - very, very close to the real hardware - but not so much with some of their later efforts.
I have their Pro-One and their K2 and both lack the character and warmth of the originals. They sound like clones.
The P800, Solina and Kat all seem very good though.
People who accuse Behringer of cloning are missing the point.
They used to literally copy circuit traces and component BOMs. That's just outright theft. But they don't do that now.
The recent synths are clones in name only. They keep the panel graphics and functions but reimplement updates of the original circuits with SMD parts on new board layouts using a new industrial supply chain.
They have a deliberate policy of building reusable platforms so the development costs can be spread across multiple products.
All of that is innovative, and there's a lot more involved than copying an old circuit.
There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss. But it's not necessarily more psychopathic than (say) Roland's approach, which is to keep reselling versions of the same technology - often with the same samples - over and over at cash-grab prices for a couple of decades.