For Sale: Roger Linn's original prototype MPC from 1986

Here's the one and only prototype of Roger Linn's Midistudio. It was announced at NAMM in 1986 as the replacement for the Linn 9000. That machine had velocity-sensitive pads, but the Midistudio added sampling, and put the pads into the famous 4x4 grid. This machine was the demo model used by the sales team, and it's for sale in the current Vemia auction - currently for £880. Linn went bust in 1986, the Midistudio was never manufactured, and Roger went to design for Akai, releasing the MPC 60 in 1988. It's great watching design evolve. This has the sliders from the Linn 9000, but the colour from the MPC. The cool removable control panel (a 100ft extension cable would have been available) didn't re-surface until the Akai S6000 from 1998, by which time the hardware sampler was all but dead.

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

Too bad there isn't a museum for such things.

# posted by

SIGHUP : 7:53 pm

sadly the link doesnt work, because the vemia site has been broken for FOUR YEARS NOW.

life's too short to even try buying something from them.

# posted by

bengoldacre : 3:43 pm

This absolutely WAS produced. We had one at Guitar Center on the north side of Chicago.

# posted by

Zero : 11:17 pm

Not according to the letter from Roger Linn that was published in Keyboard magazine:

"No Midistudios were ever shipped. If I cannot re-start Linn, there is a good chance that some other company will purchase the designs to both the midistudio and the LinnSequencer and then manufacture and distribute them."

http://members.aol.com/uniquenyc/key17.htm

# posted by

Tom Whitwell : 12:13 am

If that is the case, then we had a pretty damn good prototype that looked exactly like the brochure...much nicer than the prototype pictured here.

# posted by

Zero : 6:55 am