Sad to hear these guys have closed their doors and no longer will be manufacturing the Tango. Lack of access to Eucon unfortunately killed this wonderful console/controller.
From where did you get this information?
As a Tango owner I received the following email from the owner of the company. The website remains up but the staff ( which was 2 people) have gone.
Dear Tango users,
I am sorry to inform you but SmartAV is no longer making or selling consoles or Tangos. This unfortunately means that there will no longer be any ongoing support, and takes immediate effect.
The company will not be disappearing and we will still be holding some spares and components. You may e-mail us at support@smartav.net for any requests for parts.
For all the Pyramix users, I am happy to say that Merging will continue supporting you, and they also are holding a good inventory of spare parts.
One of the reasons for this decision is that our customer base - professional users of Cubase, Nuendo, Logic and Pyramix - is not an expanding market and therefore it is no longer financially viable to produce this high-end product in such small numbers.
We made every effort to convince Avid to licence the EuCon protocol to us which would have dramatically increased the number of potential customers and given us access to the Pro Tools user base, but the door has been closed on that for a long while and they are not interested in talking to us.
We are sorry to have to let go. Particularly when we know that we still have such a loyal and enthusiastic user group out there.
Thank you for your patronage and support.
That is really sad to hear.
Yes it is sad.
Personally I am a long time Steinberg user ( Atari days) and the Tango is SO well integrated with Cubendo it “feels” like driving an analog board , and the build quality is Studer/SSL level.
My thoughts exactly.
I’ve been on tour for the past three months and completely missed this announcement. I’m shocked. I’ve had a Tango-1 for about eight years and absolutely love it.
This may be naive, but I wonder if we, as a Tango user group, could each come up with a small amount each year to keep them going. I don’t know how many users there are but I’m guessing it’s in the low thousands - enough to collect a decent amount with very little individual outlay.
-Now thats what i call real spirit, bramley!
-Dont wanna bad mouth avid, but, wow guys…wow. Dog eat dog?
IMHO the best route short term would be to contact ex staff and see if they’d be up for doing troubleshooting calls for a fee and I know that Soundfirm ( Smart AV owners) are open to that . There’s been no dialog about handing over the the Smart AV forum to user/ moderators, that might be a good place to start looking with the longer term in mind? A proactive users group could certainly help convince the ex staff that software updates on a freelance basis may be feasible.
For U.S. users, the Smart AV release doesn’t mention it but Harrison can provide hardware service on Tangos.
FYI Tango resale values dropped immediately - a T2 on Ebay went for $2500 and currently a T1/20 for $3,000 . I’m keeping mine and will continue to mix in Cubase 7 what ever happens.
Ironically it’s always struck me that some of the physical design features on the Nuage are very derivative of the Tango and that SDK support kind of fell off about the same time Nuage was released…
Here’s the mail I sent to talktous@smartav.net a week ago:
“Hi there,
I learned through a post on the Nuendo forums that you have discontinued sales and support for Tango consoles earlier this year (I didn’t get the newsletter for some reason), which came as a big shock to me. Not just because I think that Tango was and is a fantastic controller that deserved a lot more success in the market than it apparently was met with, but admittedly also because I worry a bit about the future of my own Tango system.
I’d like to ask you whether you have considered to at least partially open up the source code for the Tango onboard software and NetSmart? If put under a BSD-like license that permits modification and redistribution, I feel you’d do a huge service to us existing Tango users without any added expectation of support or warranty on your end. Such a step would allow developers like me to tinker with the system and try to add adaptations to new host versions or new features ourselves, effectively turning the existing Tangos into a kick-ass open platform for DAW controllers. I know I’d happily spend off-studio time digging into the protocols and seeing whether there’s any chance for me to tie in with what’s already there, or even try and replicate parts of the functionality in a new system. Maybe there are others out there who’d join me.
I realize parts of your software infrastructure might be encumbered by third-party licenses (e.g. those that tie into the Steinberg SDKs?) and therefore couldn’t be easily open sourced, but every part that is available in source would make it more likely to find workarounds for those and keep the system alive. Maybe it’d also be possible to open up any such parts, or parts in general that you don’t want to release to the public for one reason or another, to a selected circle of developers under an NDA.
I know that with Tango production on halt, there’s little at stake for you in terms of revenue, so I’m hoping you can see the value in leaving us with the means to pick up the slack on its own merits. It’d be a much appreciated gesture, and who knows - open source development has brought new and unexpected momentum to pro audio manufacturers before (I’m thinking of the Harrison and SSL synergies with Ardour), maybe it could in the long run breath new life into at least the existing market for Tango as well. The hardware is built solidly enough to survive the next few ice ages; it’d be a terrible shame if it was obsolete software that rendered the system unuseable at some point.
I’d very much enjoy to hear your thoughts on this. Also, thanks for all your great work throughout the years.
All the best,
jan”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a reply. I don’t know in which state their company is in and whether their support account is still staffed, so if anyone happens to know someone at SmartAV, maybe you’d like to forward the inquiry or pass the idea on in your own words. That’d be great.
Great stuff. PM’d you.
I have a Tango 1 and, as others have said, the build quality is great. And since the show / hide tracks feature was added in the Nuendo mixer, I find it a lot better to work with. I’d be happy to help with any plans for ongoing support of existing users.
Annoyingly, my Tango has recently stopped working. I don’t know what happened but now I’m not seeing any supported DAWs in the Netsmart window (right hand side), though the Tango itself is showing up on the left. I’ve tried re-installing netsmart, making sure to check the Nuendo module, but it hasn’t helped. I have both 32 and 64 Nuendo 6.5, Nuendo 7 64, Pro Tools 10 and 11 installed on my machine (PC running windows 7), but no DAWs show up in Netsmart. Anyone help?
Cheers
Pez
Is the “NS” logo in Netsmart showing black or coloured ?
I’m guessing Tango is not getting all the way through the connections below, if so where does it stop?
DAW selected –
• Net Smart detected –
• Subnet compatible –
• DAW application installed –
• Connection initiated
• Synchronising –
Try pinging the Tango IP address from cmd to ensure ethernet connections are OK.
Thanks Bramley
NS logo is black.
In the sequence, it only gets as far as “Network Connected”
Ping test works fine.
So it seems that the connection is good. But, nothing appears in the list of supported DAWs in the NS settings page which makes me wonder if the software is working. It doesn’t “think” there’s a DAW installed. I would expect both Nuendo and Pro tools to show up (and presumably they show up whether a surface is connected or not). I will try to install NS on another computer and see what happens.
Cheers
Pez
If you’re 100% sure your ethernet connection is working both ways and all your network settings are fine, maybe download the service manual and read “network problems” on P 53 .
The steps there will let you access the Tango internal computer and see if everything’s working as it should. This involves plugging in a keyboard & mouse but is pretty easy to follow.
(I found the service manual by googling ’ Smart av Tango service manual", believe it or not it came up as a result)