I didn't see a price listed, but I'm pretty sure they're marketing it towards radio stations in the 90's. And the super-hacky ones are still using the chipmunk voice.

If I remember right they actually have I/O for an analog phone line. Also people are asking over 0 for them used now.

(I think someone famous used one once or something)

It might be sort of fun, if it it was selling for twenty bucks and it weren't for the fact that all the voices sound like robots.

Yeah, for what it costs you could get a much cooler 80s Korg vocal processor with a decent preamp, pitch shifting and a really nice vocoder plus some other stuff I think.

or for 2 dollars at the goodwill, you can get the Fisher Price voice changing megaphone.

Well that would be a good substitute for this but not for a decent vocoder.

If these things were cheap I can think of all kinds of great ways I'd misuse one. Put it AFTER a long reverb on a send (so reverb only, no dry signal) and play with the formant shift...

And then feed that straight into a second reverb probably,

God, I miss owning a vocoder. If you've never had one, you just don't understand.

I had a vocoder for a while when i was a teenager. I was pretty disappointed when I couldn't recreate the vocoder part from california love.

that's because there's no vocoder in California Love, that's a talkbox. Can't make the one sound like the other.

I really, really need a good vocoder. So badly. All I have right now (not counting software because that doesn't count) is the one in my Boss SE-50 and that's better used for other things than vocoding.

It's too bad nearly all of the decent analog vocoders cost as much as a good used car these days (as opposed to costing as much as a good new car lik they did when they were new).

This is one of the few budget vocoding options I've found that I'd actually consider, but even here they tend to be 2-3 times what I can afford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2abjbU8qMM

I like to think he uses it to pretend to be his own mother and give himself a good telling off.