[sdiy] ALFA clone chips?

[Neil Johnson]

Hi all,

Answering a couple of points in one post.

cheater cheater wrote:
> That's kinda sorta disappointing in a way - I appreciate new circuits
> a lot but what about having replacement parts for older synths? It
> would be nice to have an exact copy of the old thing.

Two reasons I can think of:
1/ It's too small a market to be worth entering into.  The number of old
synths needing replacement parts reduces every year.  It's a dead end.

2/ Even then, due to process variation no two synths
sounded exactly the same even when new.  So who's "sound" do you want
the new, better, replacement chips to sound like?  Your synth's voice?
Mine?  The bloke next door?


Ben Bradley wrote:
> Are these still only available from the "boutique" distributors? I'll
> buy from them but I'd prefer to buy from Digikey, Mouser or Arrow or
> other large mainstream distributor if I can. Will they ever pick up
> these lines, or is the total expected sales quantity just too small,
> or what? Digikey and Mouser carry lots of Adafruit and Sparkfun stuff,
> I've ordered the breakout boards for several hard-to-hand-solder
> chips, they're a great convenience. If the big distributors can carry
> those, I would think they could carry the synth chips.

Again, a couple of reasons I can think of:

1/ It's not worth it for you.  Just as an example, check out the OPA1678
opamp from TI.  You can buy a reel of 2,500 direct from TI for 0.22 cents
each.  Now look on mouser.  If you want 1, then you pay 0.87 cents.
That's about 4x the price from TI.  Even if you buy them in a 2,500 reel
you still pay 31.4 cents to Mouser, about 1.5x what TI charge.  Now these
new synthesizer chips are a lot more expensive than an opamp, so that x4
factor basically means that Mouser would charge about the same as those
boutique distributors.

2/ Every sale has a cost.  The small guys have to carefully manage the
costs of running the business to ensure their survival.  The chip
industry is very expensive to get into, completely nothing like banging
out some little circuit boards.  A typical up-front cash out the door
before the first sale figure for designing and making an analogue IC is
about $50-100k.  Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but that's a reasonable
figure.  So the only way these little chip companies survive is by selling
in volume direct to musical instrument manufacturers.  Luckily they're
also happy to support the DIYer through small distributors where the
cost of sale is low, but still not zero.

Cheers,
Neil