[sdiy] Death of DIY?

[Richard Wentk]

t 00:20 19/07/2005, phillip m gallo wrote:
>Graham,
>
>The internet is wonderful regarding info dispersal.   As you indicate the
>dispersal of knowledge can lead to a wide community of effort.
>
>Before the Internet ???   Well there were periodicals and "clubs".   Some
>periodicals where widely distributed like Popular Electronics, Radio
>Electronics, Byte  and Wireless World,  some where "special interest club"
>periodicals.

It's worth remembering just how *slow* these were though. Magazines 
obviously relied on a monthly cycle, and they also weren't interactive. You 
did what you could to fill in the gaps in your knowledge by working things 
out yourself, but if you had a question you were stuck.

Also if you wanted to find out more about Product X, whether it was a 
component or a finished synthesizer, you typically clipped a coupon, mailed 
it in, and then anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to (occasionally) a 
few months later you got something back in the post that perhaps, if you 
were lucky, told you what you wanted to know.

The only way to file things like datasheets was in paper form. Which 
inevitably led to mountains of stuff.

Now you can get almost anything you want online in seconds, and find an 
interactive support/hobbyist group in a minute or two.

However - as others have already said here, the DIY ethic isn't nearly as 
strong now as it was then. It seems to have drifted towards modding and 
overclocking PCs, which is a much smaller universe to explore than DIY 
electronics, and VST coding, which is potentially a big universe - and one 
that some people have done fantastic things in.

So the basic problem is that there's no real need for hardware DIY. The 
stuff you can buy ready made is so good and so cheap most of the incentive 
to DIY anything has gone - except for that small minority that enjoys it 
for its own sake.

My main motivation with synth DIY was never problem solving or engineering 
geekery, but wanting to get my hands on equipment that I didn't have a hope 
in hell of being able to ever afford ready made. When a good polysynth cost 
the equivalent of maybe $20,000 today, that was a big incentive. Now you 
can buy softsynths that make a Moog modular look like a cheap toy, the 
incentive to build stuff isn't nearly as compelling, especially when the 
choice for a gigging musician is between packing a laptop and packing 
something that can only be moved in a truck.

So the demographic has shrunk from enthusiasts to purists, who by 
definition are a much smaller constituency.

Richard