Fractal Audio Axe Fx IV Product Imminent??

Are you going to sell your Axe Fx III now?

  • Total voters
    58
DrewJD82 said:
Of all these Cliff horror stories, I've yet to see receipts.
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Lemme see if I can help out a little here. FYI, I wouldn't characterize my experience as a "horror story." It damn sure didn't frighten me. Since the whole thing inevitably went nowhere, I had no need to retain the emails Cliff sent me. His final remark in the second email was, "You'll be hearing from my attorney," which never happened.

A year or two later, I deleted the emails while cleaning up my archives. I did, however, report the threatening PM he sent me via TOP to the site management. The interchanges occurred ca. 2014 over an apparent non-disparagement clause in his severance contract with Atomic Amps, which (duh) had no effect on me as a contractor to Atomic. In addition to my not being bound by the agreement, I had not disparaged Cliff or FAS.

Not only was I not a party to the contract, I had never seen it, nor was I informed of any of the terms. When Cliff threatened me, I did him the courtesy of offering to have my attorney examine the agreement and advise me on it, if he would just transmit it to me. That offer almost certainly would have trapped him, since such agreements invariably include strict nondisclosure language. FYI, you can't bind somebody to a contract to which they are neither a party nor a witness. Especially when you can't even quote the clause you allege they are violating without violating the agreement yourself.
 
jay mitchell said:
Lemme see if I can help out a little here. FYI, I wouldn't characterize my experience as a "horror story." It damn sure didn't frighten me. Since the whole thing inevitably went nowhere, I had no need to retain the emails Cliff sent me. His final remark in the second email was, "You'll be hearing from my attorney," which never happened.

A year or two later, I deleted the emails while cleaning up my archives. I did, however, report the threatening PM he sent me via TOP to the site management. The interchanges occurred ca. 2014 over an apparent non-disparagement clause in his severance contract with Atomic Amps, which (duh) had no effect on me as a contractor to Atomic. In addition to my not being bound by the agreement, I had not disparaged Cliff or FAS.

Not only was I not a party to the contract, I had never seen it, nor was I informed of any of the terms. When Cliff threatened me, I did him the courtesy of offering to have my attorney examine the agreement and advise me on it, if he would just transmit it to me. That offer almost certainly would have trapped him, since such agreements invariably include strict nondisclosure language. FYI, you can't bind somebody to a contract to which they are neither a party nor a witness. Especially when you can't even quote the clause you allege they are violating without violating the agreement yourself.
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Wait, Cliff worked for Atomic?!?!?
 
crispsandwich said:
They started working with Rob Chapman at one point. That is NEVER a good move, the man is a tit.
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I don’t think Rob was the problem in this case they were sunk way before that , Even Rob had the sense to disassociate himself from them pretty quickly so you k is it’s bad 😂
 
It was for Tonocracy, which ended up being a pretty decent software platform, but still appears to be a business plan disaster.

Eventually it became free, works pretty well overall, but development seems to have stopped quite some time ago.
 
Jarick said:
Wasn't Rob teasing some new Atomic modeling thing a couple years ago?
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At Tonocracy launch. I wanna say they ditched him because there was negative backlash to having him as a spokesperson or it became very clear very quickly that he didn't even have a clue what the product was that he was pitching?

At launch it seemed like there was some actual outside investment behind Tonocracy if I remember right. So that flop...probably sucked up a whooooooole lot of energy. It's one thing for a couple of guys to have a side hustle getting modelers/speakers made in a factory in China and stored in their garage; it's another thing to have outside investors involved.
 
Boudoir Guitar said:
At Tonocracy launch. I wanna say they ditched him because there was negative backlash to having him as a spokesperson or it became very clear very quickly that he didn't even have a clue what the product was that he was pitching?

At launch it seemed like there was some actual outside investment behind Tonocracy if I remember right. So that flop...probably sucked up a whooooooole lot of energy. It's one thing for a couple of guys to have a side hustle getting modelers/speakers made in a factory in China and stored in their garage; it's another thing to have outside investors involved.
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Honestly I think the Rob Chapman backlash was over the top, but he also hasn't done any favors for himself by shilling for any random thing that came across his desk.

Atomic had such a weird arc, the original Atomic Reactor was a really neat idea, then the CLR was really well received, and the Amplifire was an excellent sounding modeler for the price. But they just seemed to fall apart and then disappeared.
 
zedhed said:
Someone really fucked that company up in my opinion.

CLR...on the market...off the market...on again...off again...useless!
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I feel like somebody really dropped the ball at that company for just about everything. Their gear was hard to get, poorly supported etc.

I had the CLR's predecessor, the all tube Atomic FR (which I liked and should have kept in hindsight!), and I could never get Atomic support to answer even simple support questions about the FR's fan. Not via email, not via Facebook.
 
Boudoir Guitar said:
At launch it seemed like there was some actual outside investment behind Tonocracy if I remember right.
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If there was, it could not have been substantial. Tom stiffed one of the key developers midway through the process. A well-financed effort would have been able to keep paying the essential players during the initial phase at least. I'm not disclosing privileged information here, BTW. The developer publicly disclosed this a year or so ago.
Boudoir Guitar said:
So that flop...probably sucked up a whooooooole lot of energy.
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Prior to the break with the unpaid Tonocracy developer, Tom's association with Marc Gallo came to a close, ending any possibility of further development - or even code support - of the Amplifire product family. I disassociated myself from Atomic some time before that. The last update to the CLR was made almost a decade ago, and it did not include everything I had called for. It appears that he can continue having them made, although the offshore vendor for the completed systems has undergone a major ownership change.
Boudoir Guitar said:
It's one thing for a couple of guys to have a side hustle getting modelers/speakers made in a factory in China and stored in their garage;
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That comes awfully close to describing FAS in the early days. Cliff did originally have the motherboards stuffed in the US, but that eventually gave way to complete manufacture in China. It wasn't terribly long ago that Cliff's ability to pack and ship units posed strict limits on the daily output of Axe-Fxs (as disclosed publicly by Cliff).

The big diff between FAS and Atomic is that, in the former case, the company founder has the requisite technical background to also be the chief designer of the company's products. Atomic, OTOH, has chosen to use hired guns to do the heavy lifting. I'm not saying that's impossible, but it clearly poses some challenges.
Boudoir Guitar said:
it's another thing to have outside investors involved.
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I don't think that was ever the case with Atomic.
 
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