I’ve joined the No New Gear Year group on Discord, and one of the things someone posted was a link to this excellent Manifesto for Critical Thinking in Synthesizer Culture and related essay Synthesizers, Engagement, and the Myth of GAS.
There’s a lot to chew on here, and I agree with much of it. The synth community does tend to argue repetitvely about certain things which are really a matter of subjective personal taste (and in many cases are actually irrelevant). It also tends to encourage consumption while simultaneously judging it with a sort of moral lens, and to some extent, tends to focus on gear choices over creative choices, technique etc.
(I’m actually wondering whether I should change how I engage with online forums, partly for that reason. But it’s also acting as sort of a substitute for socializing, so… it’s complicated.)
Depending on the segment of the community, there’s also a tendency to assign a sort of moral value to: hardware vs. software; analog vs. digital; working with different sample rates and bit depths; the use of presets, samples and loops; the use of computers; basic building block modules vs. modules that combine functions for musical utility; different genres of music… it can get ridiculous.
One point in the manifesto that I take a little issue with is the weighing of technical specifications. They might be objective but in a lot of cases, numbers don’t tell the most important parts of the story, and are sometimes used as marketing tools. You can’t compare the “quality” of digital synths merely by looking at sample rates or bit depth, and in fact there is no objective “quality” that determines whether a synth sounds good, is inspiring, etc. Nor does more filter models, more built-in LFOs, more wavetables, more presets etc. predict anything useful. “More” isn’t better, “less” isn’t better. Better is usually better… but “better” is context-dependent and subjective!