New product highlights from The NAMM Show 2025
The latest music tech innovations on display at this year's NAMM show in Anaheim, California.
The annual NAMM show is a diary highlight for many music technology enthusiasts and industry professionals. NAMM (the music, sound and event industry’s trade association) managed to host the event successfully in Anaheim, California, despite wildfires raging some 60 miles northwest.
This year’s event saw a number of new launches, iterations and product reissues, and brought the whole industry together under one roof to share new product innovations.
At the show, MQA Labs released a suite of tools for engineers called QRONO that focuses on overcoming the “flatness” often present in digital recordings.
The problem, according to the company, is related to the fact that we can perceive distinct auditory signals as close together as 7 microseconds [1-3] (see image below).
“This precision was critical for early humanity’s survival,” the company states in its Whitepaper. “As it applies to music perception, it provides the fine texture, clear delineation and spatial impression of musical instruments. Audio processing that fails to preserve these time details will blur sounds together. For decades, digital audio technologies and systems overlooked the critical importance of this level of accuracy. Armed with this new knowledge, it’s imperative to double-down on efforts to improve and fix this aspect of digital audio.”
Their solution is to design DAC filters that do not exhibit pre-ringing and stop ringing fast enough to not blur events that can be discerned by our hearing. “QRONO d2a uses proven engineering practice combined with thoughtful and creative solutions to create a breakthrough in digital audio reproduction.”
Keep in down
Elsewhere, Celestion launched Peacekeeper, a low-sensitivity, dual voice coil, attenuating 12in speaker for guitarists and other amplified musicians.
The innovation here is in its unique dual voice coil design, which the company claims can enable musicians to get the “sweet spot” of sound without needing volume to get there, something no other speaker has yet achieved. The reduced input sensitivity allows it to be driven harder, thus acting as a natural attenuator for guitar amps, which previously required musicians to use a separate attenuating device to achieve.
There were also a number of iconic instruments being ported into the software world this year, namely Novation’s collaboration with GForce Software on its Bass Station and Roland bringing its Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus “officially” to DAWs.
The Bass Station, loved by the electronic music world since its launch in the early 1990s, delivers 16-voice polyphony and unison mode in its software version and has an in-built arpeggiator and sequencer.
The JC-120 Jazz Chorus guitar amplifier, meanwhile, was celebrating its 50th birthday this year. The new official software version will be compatible with VST3, AU, and AAX plug-in formats and includes extended parameters for modern production environments.
In the instrument space, Nord unveiled its new Piano 6, which brings advanced layering capabilities and greater flexibility for performance. Players are able to combine two independent sample-based synth layers and piano layers.
Some of the keyboard’s noteworthy effects include: dedicated effects section per layer; modulation effects with rate and amount; global Reverb with send per layer, pre-delay, chorale and bright/dark mode, among others.
Coming together
A surprising development at this year’s show was the announcement of Native Instruments’ Native Kontrol Standard (NKS) Hardware Partner Program.
In its release, it stated that industry leaders Akai Professional, Novation, Nektar, Korg, and M-Audio are adopting the NKS ecosystem to power seamless integration with Native Instruments software. This connects music makers to over 2,000 NKS-compatible instruments and effects from more than 250 brands.
“This expansion highlights the impact of collaboration,” said Simon Cross, Chief Product Officer at Native Instruments. “It marks an important milestone in our mission to provide musicians with an open, connected platform, making professional-grade tools, instruments, and technology more accessible to creators everywhere.”
Classics reimagined
In the guitar world Marshall teased “a new take on a classic” amplifier and a “stomping new line-up” of FX pedals ahead of the event.
At the show the company presented five new compact overdrive pedals modelled from its classic range of amplifiers, following the recent product trend towards making things smaller and lighter.
However, the company still focused on its traditional market at the show, announcing new modified valve amps (1959, JCM800) as well as a a new JCM 900 Studio model.
The modified versions have taken the classic design and modernised them with mid-shift functionality, two overdrives and a ‘tight sound’ switch to produce a tighter, snappier low end.
All talk, no show
NAMM 2025 was a stronger showing compared to its post-covid 2024 edition that returned to its regular January slot. However, times have changed and heavyweights such as Fender did not have a booth to display its vast array of guitars, but just personnel to meet the dealers.
The guitar company’s CEO, Andy Mooney, told Guitar World: “I think we really missed the personal interaction with the dealer base. That, I think, is the single biggest thing.”
“Even though we’re going back, what I felt had happened at NAMM – which is what had happened in my two previous lives at Nike and Disney – is that trade shows take on a life of their own […] It becomes Booth Wars – ‘My booth has to be bigger than your booth’ – and you end up spending tons of money for a very short period of time. We were kind of thinking, ‘Is this the right way to go forward?’”
He continued: “For Covid, we were compelled to do something differently and what we found during Covid when we did the online events, we were able to do them at much less cost but reach deeper into the organisation.”
Time will tell if other large manufacturers will follow this approach for next year’s event.
No bass innovations for 2025?