Theres been chatter in other corners of the internet for weeks about this, and when I started looking it turned out the The Times newspaper had a story about this in early July. And companies house records indicate that Roland Lamb was removed as a director back in April, but the paperwork for that only showed up online in July. More recently, their website shows no available products to buy and a banner about ‘site maintenance’.
Here is an article about this which appeared yesterday, probably because the news got further reach within the synth community by being covered on the Pro Synth Network show yesterday.
People sometimes focus on product-related reasons for Rolis deep trouble over the years, but arguably larger components to that story include the entire VC funding model from the early days, the vast amounts of money burnt, and occasional analysis of Roland Lambs personality. I wont get into all that again here, but lets just say that type of personality struggles to learn the meaningful lessons from previous mistakes, and I never saw anything in the second Roli companies financial statements that made me think the outcome would be different the second time around. They also struggled with product supply throughout their second incarnation, including with the full size Piano and Airwaves stuff of more recent years. These difficulties fulfilling orders in a timely fashion were no doubt made worse by their reputation after the first company failure, eg the really really huge amounts of money they owed their manufacturing partners after the first collapse. I expect this meant they had to take money up front and get production done in small batches during their second incarnation.