German gear manufacturer Behringer has a history of announcing instruments long before they hit the market, teasing music-makers with shots of prototyped products via its Facebook page years before those products receive an official release.
So many of these unreleased "vaporware" products have been announced, in fact, that we felt the need to put together an exhaustive list of to keep you all updated – a list that featured not one or two, but 37 instruments at the time of writing. (To Behringer's credit, a handful of those have since been released.)
There has previously been some backlash from impatient music-makers frustrated by the company's tendency to overshare. Last year, Behringer hit back at these critics via its social media accounts before triumphantly showing up at NAMM a month later (its first appearance in a decade) with a raft of new releases in tow, including its eagerly anticipated clones of the LinnDrum and PPG Wave.
It appears that Behringer may be up to its old tricks again, however, as reports on Reddit suggest that the company may be cancelling two long-awaited synths that have been in development for several years. Several customers have reported that preorders made via US gear retailer Sweetwater for Behringer's Pro-16 and VCS3 synths have been cancelled.
While this hasn't been officially confirmed by Behringer, screenshots of messages allegedly sent by a Sweetwater employee suggest that Behringer is discontinuing the development of both instruments. "Behringer just let us know that the Pro-16 isn't happening, so I just cancelled your order," one message reads.
The instruments in question are the Pro-16, a clone of the Prophet-5 with expanded 16-voice polyphony that was on display (but not plugged in) at NAMM earlier this year, and the VCS3, a clone of the classic EMS synth of the same name that was first teased all the way back in June 2019. (In 2023, Behringer claimed that it was shipping units of the VCS3 to beta testers for "final testing".)
Last year, Behringer shared an update on the Pro-16 that described the "extraordinarily complex" engineering work behind its design, suggesting that the development of the product has proved more costly and demanding than expected.
The VCS3 has also presented some technical difficulties: the company admitted in 2022 that the development of the synth has taken “a particularly long time, as the mechanical construction of the matrix, plus the recreation of analogue circuitry was very complex and needed several iterations”.
The commercial landscape has also shifted significantly since both products were announced. Just a few weeks ago, Sequential released the Fourm, a competitively priced analogue polysynth with authentic Prophet heritage, likely undercutting demand for a budget Prophet clone like the Pro-16.
Combine this with aggressive US tariffs that have driven up the cost of importing Chinese-manufactured gear like Behringer's, and it seems possible that complex and expensive projects like the Pro-16 and VCS3 have ceased to be commercially viable.
This month, Behringer has officially released two mini-synths, the CZ-1 Mini and UB-Xa Mini, suggesting that the company may be prioritizing smaller, lower-risk projects over its more ambitious recreations. This is all speculation, however, and whether the Pro-16 and the VCS3 have genuinely been abandoned remains to be seen.
We've reached out to Behringer for comment.
