A beautiful DIY synth ..

[Jay Vaughan]

> Well, here is your next problem....  if *I* provide crappy parts, are
> you going to get blamed for my disappointment when it doesnt work
> right?

we've thought about this - its an *assembly* service only.  the  
testing/bootup is up to you.. though we thought we might add some  
extra services in the case of well-known DIY synth kits .. so this  
would mean we'd have to handle the warrantee issue and in the case of  
well-known kits, we'd offer the same warrantee as the kit provider..

and to be honest, if you're sending us, e.g. a MOTM kit, or sound  
labs mini synth - the parts are decent, and it would take a  
catastrophic failure on the assembly side to result in a non-working  
synth.  plus, we might add the 'tuning' service as a one-time fee,  
with reasonable re-tunes done for free ..

> >What about after the fact if something breaks?  will you
> service what you build?  Also, if I am providing the parts, that $1750
> figure would definitely come down quite a bit.  Then there is the
> whole overseas shipping and what not...
>

well thats a good point, we're working on those issues .. informally.

> Convincing 5~10 guys like me that paying you to build something will
> be as good as buying something roughly equivalent off the shelf will
> be a hard one.

fortunately we have some creative ideas about this angle.  what it  
takes, first and foremost, is some completed projects with good  
documentation.  in fact, the documentation is where we'd excel on  
this sort of startup idea, anyway.

> Most of the guys into DIY synths will just build it
> themselves.  Guys like me are generally content with what Studio
> Electronics or Doepfer can build for you, and they *do* offer
> warrantee and such.  Its just something to consider.  For $1750, i
> could also get a Prophet 08, which to a guy like me is near a perfect
> synth.
>

we'd offer a warantee, for sure, especially if the synth is based on  
a well-known kit provider like elby or such ..

> Not to take the wind out of the sales, but if I am to be considered
> part of your target market, you should know what we think.
>


absolutely, and this is why i'm interested in your opinion.

we have some other - big and cool - ideas about how to go about this  
from a rational startup perspective.  as i said, documentation would  
be *key* and in my opinion for this to work properly you'd have to be  
able to track the progress of the build every step of the way, so  
we'd make a little hot website action that could be used for you to  
personally watch the progress, live even, from wherever you are ..

;
--
Jay Vaughan