How reliable are your hardware synths?

[KrisM]

My Octatrack had to go in for a headphone jack repair back in January. It was under warranty so I paid $25 to ship it from Texas to California, insured for $1000.

My OP-1's internal mic is "permanently disconnected" because the jack design sucks (mechanical switch is stuck in the 'open' position, I believe). I never bothered to have it repaired (TE wanted me to send it to JRR for repair, and then if they couldn't, they were to send it to TE... just wasn't worth bothering Uncle E and company), the cost of the IO board from TE is reportedly around $50 but they may have stopped sending them to people, so I don't know what it'd cost, now.

My EWI 4000S is great, never had an issue. However, I have to replace the mouthpiece screw with a stainless one, as the stock screw rusts shut eventually -_- The EWI USB that costs half the cost, or less, has a stainless screw lol...

Blofeld is too new to say.

[Jace-BeOS]

... The best reason for owning a K2500/K2600 keyboard is that awesome ribbon strip.

Why aren't those more common on hardware?? They seem like such an obvious inclusion on a keyboard, but there are so few. i have wanted on for some time, but cannot afford any of the keyboards (currently all used) that have them, and the standalones are either do-it-yourself kits i cannot deal with, or overblown cost. It seems to me to be an area of strange absence. i would think that the more varied types of input, the better, but all we seem to see on the market are keys, pads, sliders, knobs... the end. Breath controllers, ribbons, and poly pressure are almost nowhere, and i can't really seem to adapt my Yamaha wind controller to provide only pressure (and it's not exactly convenient to play keys with that thing). My VG-99 has a short non-pressure sensitive ribbon and a D-Beam on it, but they aren't exactly quick to assign to other hardware devices or software...

[bluedad]

Just looking at a recent bill. Having a broken key replaced on an AN1X $80; greasing the key guides and something else I can't read on an SY77 $120.

[mztk]

There is also no way in hell I'll ever send another synth to a repair shop who A) Charges up-front and B) Isn't local.

this guy was a total conman.

[ghettosynth]

There is also no way in hell I'll ever send another synth to a repair shop who A) Charges up-front and B) Isn't local.

this guy was a total conman.

I don't know who you're talking about, but in any case this is something of a strong statement. I'm not defending bad service, but, there's more than one side to every story and, in the past when I've done repairs, I've tried to prepare customers for the worst but they don't always listen very well.

[Uncle E]

I once had a repair place close up shop and take my 1965 Fender Bassman head with them. To add insult to injury, I'd prepaid them $150 for the work.

[ghettosynth]

I once had a repair place close up shop and take my 1965 Fender Bassman head with them. To add insult to injury, I'd prepaid them $150 for the work.

Surely someone knew where it was? There must have been some time lapse between them closing up shop and you enquiring about it? Did they not inform, or at least try to inform, all of their current customers that they were closing up shop?

[Uncle E]

Surely someone knew where it was? There must have been some time lapse between them closing up shop and you enquiring about it? Did they not inform, or at least try to inform, all of their current customers that they were closing up shop?

Not only did they not notify me, when I contacted their parent company, I was told that they'd ripped them off, too.

[ghettosynth]

Surely someone knew where it was? There must have been some time lapse between them closing up shop and you enquiring about it? Did they not inform, or at least try to inform, all of their current customers that they were closing up shop?

Not only did they not notify me, when I contacted their parent company, I was told that they'd ripped them off, too.

That's unfortunate. What do you mean by parent company, were they a franchise/chain, or just someone that contracted to GC/some other music store?

[Uncle E]

Torres Engineering

[ghettosynth]

Torres Engineering

This place?

http://www.yelp.com/biz/torres-engineering-san-carlos

It's still not clear to me, was Torres the parent company, or the company that still has your bassman?

At any rate, it doesn't seem like the customers have much good to say. There's one review on there that I think highlights well the conflict between customer and service tech. The guy that talks about his amp being rebuilt. So, should a shop do $450 worth of repair without getting consent? Probably not, but, it costs time to break down gear, and find the problem(s). Depending in what kind of gear we're talking about, it's often quite a pain in the ass to get it back to a point where it can sit on the shelf while the tech gets approval. I used to give customers a ballpark range and let them know that they might get lucky, but most gear of that type falls in that range. I used to fix a lot of stereo amps and the common problem was that the customer blew a channel. Pretty much this meant replacing every semiconductor back to the phase inverters as well as any high current low value resistors which usually get hot and change value. There's no point in calling you, your big ass amp is probably going to cost, say $300, to fix. Either you want it fixed or you don't.

The other thing is that they guy says "it needed new pots or something", point blank, he doesn't know. Every customer has some friend with half ass knowledge who tells them "yeah, mine did that and it just needed cleaning" and the customer will come in with this knowledge and believe that they are helping. They are not. Just describe what it doesn't do and let the tech fix the problem.

That said, there are shitty techs who might try to turn a "needs new pots" into an amp rebuild. I remember working with this guy who was arrogant as hell, talked a big game, but always seemed to have customer problems. Turns out he really didn't know what he was doing, but, consumer electronics repair is a shitty business and there weren't many people with the right education willing to take those jobs.

[AusDisciple]

ghettosynth, I can totally relate to everything you mentioned in that last post. I learned my trade fixing TV sets and HiFi gear in the late 80s. I moved into live sound and PA system design and maintenance after I completed my apprenticeship and that was a much more satisfying job. From there I moved into sound engineering (live and studio) which was the plan right from the beginning.

As you mention, there's always two sides to a repair story. Sometimes, the story from the customer agrees with the story from the tech but more often than one would like, there is a vast difference which is typically neither party's fault but more a misunderstanding, often on both sides. A good tech learns how to prepare the customer for the most likely outcome, thus avoiding as much as possible that scenario and that is a skill that isn't learned in the TAFE colleges. It is learned through experience AFTER one obtains their qualifications hopefully sooner rather than later!

[Uncle E]

At any rate, it doesn't seem like the customers have much good to say. There's one review on there that I think highlights well the conflict between customer and service tech. The guy that talks about his amp being rebuilt. So, should a shop do $450 worth of repair without getting consent?

Torres has been notorious for hack jobs since the 80's. That's why I took my '65 Bassman to them, it had a Torres hack job done to it and I wanted it returned to normal!

[tapper mike]

The last time I had an amp repaired.

The last time I had an amp repaired was the early 90's The guy who did it worked the entire Lower Peninsula and had his shop in Petoskey He spent two days a week on pick up and delivery to local guitar shops. It was $50 for the bench and that could be made applicable to the repair. I knew him for years and told him when I laid down the bench...If it's 200 or more call me back and if it's under 200 I'll pick it up. He called anyway... all it cost me was the bench.

I'd known him for years but I hadn't had any work done by him up to that point. The place I worked at did have a lot of biz with him.

[ghettosynth]

The last time I had an amp repaired.

The last time I had an amp repaired was the early 90's The guy who did it worked the entire Lower Peninsula and had his shop in Petoskey He spent two days a week on pick up and delivery to local guitar shops. It was $50 for the bench and that could be made applicable to the repair. I knew him for years and told him when I laid down the bench...If it's 200 or more call me back and if it's under 200 I'll pick it up. He called anyway... all it cost me was the bench.

I'd known him for years but I hadn't had any work done by him up to that point. The place I worked at did have a lot of biz with him.

That's not making sense, you prepaid the bench fee, and then he called you to get approval for the bench fee? You mean that he called to let you know what he fixed for your $50, amiright?

Here's a story about the easiest "bench fee" that I ever earned. Some gal calls me frantically 4:30 PM on a Friday, we closed at 5:00PM sharp! She says, my printer just died, I have a term paper due on monday and I need it for the weekend. I say, well, we close at five and the chance that I can do anything in that window is VERY unlikely, but if it just isn't coming on, there's a very small chance that it's something that is simple and I can fix it quickly. We have a minimum fee, however, and,I have to charge you that fee just to look at it and you need to get it down here in the next few minutes.

We would not always charge that fee, but if you want me to come out and give you special service at the last minute on your schedule, you're paying the bench fee. The boss didn't like us fixing things out of turn and we didn't want to encourage our customers to think that they could distract techs all day thinking that their stuff just needed a "clean" and could we take a quick look at it on the bench to see. We had a strict cueing system and techs took the next job on the cue, if you're jumping the line, you weren't going to do it for free. In fact, the techs never took calls themselves, the boss called this one back to me directly because of my computer experience.

Ok, she says, she'll get there as fast as she can. About 4:50 she bursts through the door all out of breath with her printer tucked under her arm, power cable and power strip dragging behind her. I lead her back to my bench and she puts the printer down. I plugged in her power strip and went to to turn the printer on.

Ok, at this point, I was thinking that either she was hosed, or that she had just managed to get the printer into some service mode or something and that I might be able to reset it and get her on her way. There was a minor chance that she had blown a fuse, but, any tech will tell you that blown fuses usually indicate problems, not just the need for a new fuse. Still, a printer is an electromechanical device and there's some small chance that a mechanical overload of some sort will blow a fuse but not damage the device.

So I was familiar with the model and reached around the side of the printer and turned on the power switch, the printer instantly came to life. The look of shock on her face was priceless, "What did you do?" she asked, "I turned the printer on" I replied, "Where", she asked, the look of incredulity was something to behold. "Right here on the side", and I showed her the power switch. She had no idea that it was there. She had always used the switch on the power strip. Keep in mind here, that this was the first thing that I asked her on the phone, "Is the printer turned on", "yes, of course it is", she said, implying, of course, that she knew what she was doing and I was just wasting time asking her dumb questions.

Since I had to charge her the bench fee, and I had the better part of five minutes left with few minutes after that to write her up and send her on her way, I blew the dust out, cleaned some important parts, and ran a self test on the printer, she left happy, after paying her bench fee.