[sdiy] Those darned Casio chips!

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/24/04 6:07:00 AM, music.maker at gte.net writes:

<< What you're talking about is something like a library where you would pay 
to
get information.  While I agree that it's a fine idea for me and you and all
the other synth geeks out there, how could such a company make enough money to
stay afloat?   >>

Scott, we're talking about Yamaha here.  They are the world's largest 
manufacturer of musical instruments.  Even with my total lack of bean-counting 
knowledge, I can safely venture a guess that they are not exactly having trouble 
staying afloat.  To put things in perspective, Roland, one of their lesser 
competitors, has a long-standing practice of keeping and providing parts and service 
information for obsolete products as long as they still have access to those 
parts, regardless of how old the product is.  That means you can call Roland 
today and ask for a service manual for a Rhythm Ace drum machine (their very 
first product, from the late 1960's), and it will be at your doorstep in a few 
days.  If you need an odd IC or plastic piece from some long-gone Roland 
product from the 1970's, they will still sell it to you -- as long as they still 
have the parts in stock.  They even went as far as having a new run of custom 
voice IC's fabbed for all the ailing Juno 106's out there, so they could take 
care of service requests from old Juno users.  They have also gone to the trouble 
of scanning their entire service manual library (hundreds of manuals) and 
putting them up in an online PDF database for authorized service centers to 
access (this is actually a cost-cutting act in the long run).  

In sharp comparison, we have Yamaha, the fattest of the fat cats...  Besides 
the aforementioned complaints about service documentation, they have the 
utterly maddening policy of not only not providing parts for older instruments (and 
by "older", I mean just 10 years, which is Yamaha's arbitrary cutoff point), 
they also actually destroy any stock they may have of spare parts for those 10 
year old products.  That's right, they destroyed all remaining stocks of 
custom voice IC's for the CS-series synths (CS-80, etc.).  They also destroyed all 
remaining spare parts for the DX7 (in 1993, when thousands of musicians were 
still using their DX7's as a daily bread-winning tool).  They sold over 
300,000 DX7 keyboards!  That's 300,000 potentially pissed-off customers who now 
cannot buy a volume slider or custom FM IC to keep their beloved axe going for 
another decade.  There are no third parties to call for those parts, either.  
Those people, the very same folks who put Yamaha on the map and built them into a 
synth-making giant in the 1980's, as Harry Bissell might say, are now 
*fvcked*, thank you very much.  That's an awful lot of bad will for a company to 
generate.  Seems rather penny-wise/pound-foolish, if you ask me -- or if you ask 
those other 299,999 DX7 owners, and Roland obviously agrees.  I have had 
conversations with both of Roland's recent national service managers about this very 
topic, and they both were quite emphatic about Roland wanting to keep those 
old customers as happy as possible.  They both said that keeping those old 
parts and documents around does cost them money and space, but they, and the upper 
management they answer to, feel that the good will earned is well worth the 
cost.  They feel that their company has a legacy, and that honoring that legacy 
and the customers who were there at the beginning helps to legitimize their 
current efforts, and helps build a continuing loyal user base.  BTW, Roland 
also keeps a handful of in-house service techs around who can actually 
troubleshoot and repair old legacy equipment.  They will gladly take in your ailing 
TB-303 or GR-300 and repair it for you, as long as they have the parts they need 
(and they never discard or destroy old parts, they just use them until they run 
out).

BTW, Kawai, who are not even in the M.I. game anymore (they just do pianos, 
organs, and portable keyboards now) still provides parts and service for any 
and all legacy products.  They are not a big company, yet they still do this 
because they feel their customers are important.  I have also had discussions 
about this with both their USA national service manager and with the president of 
Kawai America, who is a very Japanese bean-counter of the highest order.  
It's no wonder that Kawai customers are so loyal to the company.

As an authorized Moog service tech, I was able to buy spare parts and even 
complete circuit boards for Minimoogs right up until Moog closed their doors in 
1986.  Was it keeping those old parts around that caused Moog to fail?  Not a 
chance.  It was their failure to bring out products that could compete in the 
markets of the day.  As has been mentioned here before, they had their chance 
to license Chowning's FM concepts, and they could have been the ones to bring 
a DX7-like product to the public.  If they had had the foresight to do so, we 
might still be able to buy (Moog)DX7 parts today! (and Minimoog and Memorymoog 
parts, too) (plus, I like the idea of a DX7 with a Moog ladder filter...how 
cool would that be?)

Of course, corporations are free to do whatever they want.  Conversely, we 
consumers can complain as loudly as we want about their stupid policies, and we 
will continue to do so.  Yamaha CAN afford to have a more customer-friendly 
service policy, and they should.  In the meantime, we do what we can to defend 
ourselves against their greed and stupidity.  If that means lying to them in 
order to get a fricking service manual, so be it!

As an aside, I'll mention that I recently tried to order a replacement 
trackpad for a Korg Kaoss Pad 2 from Korg parts, and they told me that the part is 
obsolete and no longer available.  WTF????  The Kaoss Pad 2 is a CURRENT Korg 
product.  It's only been available for about 2 years.  You can still buy brand 
new ones at your local Guitar Center or Sam Ash.  Korg seems to be taking a 
page from the Yamaha bean-counting book, and amplifying it.  Indeed, they have 
the same 10-years-then-into-the-trash-bin spare parts policy that Yamaha has, 
which makes a lot of M1 owners very, very mad.  And Wavestation owners.  And 
01/w owners.  And, and, and, and...  Just imagine if Ford or Chevrolet tried 
something like this.  They'd be talking about it on the McLaughlin Group and Meet 
the Press next Sunday morning!

To their partial credit, though, I must add that Yamaha and Korg are not the 
very worst offenders.  Ensoniq is, and by far.  They never even provided 
proper service manuals for any of their products.  No schematics, no 
component-level repairs -- only expensive board swaps.  "Too proprietary", they claimed.  
Yeah, as if any of their competitors were ever interested in stealing that 
lovely Ensoniq Mirage technology to use inside their Akai S-1000 or Roland S-760 
samplers.  Assholes.  Their products were shit, anyway.  I was glad to see them 
drop out of the M.I. game.

Michael Bacich

P.S. -- having been a participant in product development for Kawai, I can 
tell you that companies do specifically try to make super wonderful products.  
The "mediocre device with slick presets" cynicism that you refer to may exist at 
some level of management, but definitely not in the design and R&D 
departments.  Those guys have the passion of the Sex Pistols, circa 1978.  Quite often, 
upper managemnt would give the green light to the development teams, even if 
the product concept didn't look like a sure-fire money maker.  The Kawai K5000 
is a perfect example.  It was very expensive to develop, took many years of 
R&D effort, and it ultimately failed in the marketplace.  Nevertheless, we were 
all very proud of the machine and what it did for the company's image.  Just 
ask any K5000 owner.