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Good to hear about MIDI HD! The link below sheds a bit more light. I'm hoping it'll eventually come in a wireless flavor. I have too many damn MIDI cables going every which way...add audio and power to that mix and it's a mess.

http://www.synthtopia.com/cont...

This is my dream keyboard: http://www.synthtopia.com/cont...

Tangerine Dream made a lot of money in appearances with seldom a real instrument appearing on the stage.

Must be a recent thing?

In the old days (70's to early 80's) absolutely everything were live and they spent many hours setting up and tuning the old analogue synths so they could perform fluently despite the limitations of the primitive gear. They often performed with the lights off (only light came from from images projected onto the backdrop) and without a front sound man, mixing everything onstage as they went. The idea was to let the music grow organically and allow the audience to focus on the music, not the gear or the performers. Some of the early records were made the same way. It was only in the 1980's they started to separate things into songs which somehow became even more normal as they made more and more soundtracks.

It worked. To this day nobody has come close to recreating a similar organic flow in the world of electronic music. I'm writing this while listening to "Ricochet" from 1975. It consists of two long compositions mixed from taped recordings of the England and France portions of their autumn 1975 European Tour. The original recordings are hours of free flow improvisation sometimes going nowhere, sometimes ending in abrupt dead ends and restarts.

Here's an image also from the tour in 1975, specifically their appearance in Coventry Cathedral: http://sacvs.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/australian-tour-1975.gif
I would say that there's a lot of gear in evidence! - So unless you define 'real instrument' as something Mozart would recognize, there's plenty of instruments on stage!

Here's a modern picture: http://cdn.synthtopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/edgar-froese-tangerine-dream.jpg
Again lots of gear and even some regular drums in evidence.

In other words: I call bullsh*t on your comment about no 'real instruments' on stage.

Dude... bad scars make you look even more like a badass if you're bald. Just gotta hit the gym for a while so you aren't terribly scrawny, and life's good ;) Unless you like the Moby look ;)

Records sell in the hundreds, maybe thousands at very best.

Far from true.

"And when the CD came out, one could have imagined people saying "If you're in the record player manufacturing business..."

Look at this and this and this.

CD players have been out for so long that people are declaring the CD itself to be dead, yet there are still people making money by manufacturing record players.

Or an Apple laptop:

http://www.synthtopia.com/news/06_06/Mac_Laptop_Ex plodes_Flame.html

The Barron retrospective was very good.

There is a wealth of information available on the web now. The previously mentioned Obsolete site has a good history of electronic music instruments, and there are several classic synthesizer sites for gear freaks.

Ohm - The Gurus of Electronic music collects early electronic music recordings, including the Barrons in a three-cd set. This is as good an introduction to early electronic music as you'll find. It's jarring, though, if your only exposure has been to techno and trance!

Synthtopia has a directory of electronic music resources that is worth checking out. The site also has interviews with some interesting electronic musicians. Check out the Kompressor interview!

Electro-music is an active community of people interested in more experimental electronic music. Lots of discussion of computers and programming within the world of music.

American Mavericks is a collection of interesting PBS shows on modern classical music, and it has some good shows on electronic music.