[sdiy] Those darned Casio chips!

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Wednesday 24 November 2004 04:00 pm, WeAreAs1 at aol.com wrote:

> 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 part is obsolete and no longer available.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!

Heh.  I knew that there were things I didn't like about that company...

> 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.

Did they?  Cool.   :-)   When did that happen?  Yeah,  we were an Ensoniq 
service center too,  and I always *hated* that policy.  I actually did manage 
to squeeze one schematic out of them one time,  and that was for a 
_keyboard_,  no active components on it at all,  and that mostly because the 
customer was standing there and listening to the crap I was being handed by 
those folks,  and I then pointed out to them that this was happening and that 
the customer had several thousand dollars invested in Ensoniq gear but was 
ready to go out and trade it all in for their competitor's product.  Only 
then did I get enough of a schematic out of them for this passive keyboard 
matrix to find the bad connection and fix it.

I heard one time that the company was started by people who used to work for 
Commodore computers,  and anybody who's ever had to deal with them knows what 
I'm talking about.  There's a book out there called "The Home Computer Wars" 
that details a lot of the absolute insanity that went on inside that company,  
if anyone's curious.

We were still a service center for those folks after we closed up the shop,  
and did one repair,  where the lady who owned the keyboard called them up and 
bitched about the fact that I was working out of my house,  at which point 
they pulled the plug.  Thanks a lot,  assholes!  Slap a guy when he's down...