Hi !
Yep,- 20K pieces is right, That´s what I´ve read too.
The prob is: 20K pieces per type of chip.
There are a lot of CEMs in the early synths,- OBXa, OB8, Memorymoog, Prophet 5 rev 2+3, Jupiter 8 and Elka Synthex.
Roland started to get rid of the CEMs w/ MKS80 rev.2 and Oberheim started to reduce CEMs in their machines w/ the Xpander, Matrix12 and Matrix-1000.
How many of the synths mentioned above do exist up today, how many are trashed meanwhile, how many have been sold in the past as new ?
How many of all these chips are still existing in the stock of some small refurbishing companys but not freely available on the market ?
Isn´t it, if you can afford it, you´ll get your old dynos serviced and restaurated up today ? It´s just a question of money.
Example Xpander:
Max. of existing units maybe 2000, maybe less because some are lost meanwhile.
I´ve never seen a CEM 3374 oscillator failure up to now,- I´ve seen one died CEM 3372 signal processor/filter in 25 years in my machine and these ones are relatively easy to find and not very expensive,- I have 6 in stock for the future.
If we find 1000 people who are interested in 6 CEM 3374 each,- that´s 6000 chips. Who wants the other 14000 pieces.
What´s the flop rate in production of integrated circuits like CEMs ?
Will there be any selection of working chips out of a new production series ?
Do we have to pay the flop rate also ?
It seems, all the synths which have cohorts of CEM 3310 /3320 / 3340 and 3360 chips inside need more replacement parts compared to the Oberheims (except the SSM types). But how many fo these synths were built in the past and how many do exist today ?
But nothing failed in my MKS80 except one CEM 3360 chip in over 20 years,- and there are only 4 inside.
There are more parts in all these machines, not only CEMs ! What happens to these parts ?
What happens to the switching PSUs no one want´s to repair ?
Are there image files of the OSes for all of these synths,- how long will the eprom-chips be available (are they?) and the machines to burn these 8-Bit chips ? Who will do that ? Who will do the service for the refurbished machines in the future then ?
Don´t ask me how many techs here at my place have the knowledge to service vintage gear and these few people( I know 2) are tired of it because it´s a occasional job, not a job to make their life.
As long, we don´t get displays and the rotarys, it makes no sense to re-produce CEM 3374 for the Matrix12 and Xpander I fear.
I´m not sure, but I have the impression, there´s a trend change in the market anyway,- the people look for hardware again because of all the complexity and the never ending bugs as also update strategys regarding software.
There will be new high quality products in the hardware market in next future by well known synth designers which will not be cheap mass products at all and one of these examples seems to be the John Bowen Solaris and Kurzweil is back too and I´m sure they have some pretty good ideas and concepts in the pipeline for 2009/ 2010.
But start the poll,- I´m interested in the result anyway.
attila publik schrieb:
IIRC, I read somewhere that some company wanted a minimum order of 20.000 chipsto start making them again...There\u017ds a lot of great analog synths out there getting older...Should we start a poll for how many chips we could consider buying?/Attila