@DG said:
What is clear is that VSL is giving a huge discount for the Extended material, far more than any "old" content would warrant, and you also have a period of 30 days to try it out.
DG
I think a lot of the correspondence (and you have to admit there has been a lot of it!) can be laid at the door of the fact that VSL are not accounting for customers previous expenditure the way they have in the past.
The fact there is a new interface and it is 24bit shold not come into it, whatever this costs should be reflected in the purchase price for ALL customers not in a reduction of the discount for existing users. For example if the new cost of a symphonic cube was 10,600 euros and registered users of the pro-edition for example received a discount of 5490 euros (their original purchase price) There could be no complaints about the VIP price.
The Symphonic Cube extended contains all the samples of the pro-edition so one would expect (if VSL had maintained the spirit of "you never pay twice for the same sample") a full credit of the original purchase price against the cost of the Cube. Now if that means the price a VIP pays is not enough to cover the development of the new instruments then the total purchase price should be more not the discount less.
As the cost of the initial sample recordings, including the contracts with the musicians themselves, will have been funded fully, or to a great extent, by the purchasers of existing products, unless this is taken into account there is a strong argument that says current users are subsidising new purchasers of Vienna Instruments - to the extent that it would not be possible to retail the Symphonic Cube for €9200 unless this was the case!
Julian