Solenoid Players
By Dan Wilson
John Tuttle said about electronic pianos:
>Further, as the technology improves, the older mechanisms will become
>harder and harder to support. That has been the track record for
>electronic players ever since I've been in the player repair business.
>I don't like having to tell people, "Sorry, it can't be repaired, no
>one has the parts."
It's general practice in electronics. Customers who bought ten years and one day ago are dead meat. I worked for a branch of the Dutch conglomerate Philips. When the great digital revolution in telephone equipment took place at the end of the '70s, Philips closed not just the manufacture of the earlier equipment but the entire servicing operation, making us all redundant.
Two big and influential customers then said to them, "If that's how you regard after-sales service, you can forget trying to sell anything new to us." Philips panicked and encouraged a cowboy outfit to undertake the servicing -- it immediately went bankrupt and I went back as a consultant to do it for them.
With the best will in the world, it wasn't easy, because within a few years a lot of the original components essential to the original design went off the market. You could find replacements but they often didn't fit into the same boxes, and sometimes had new characteristics that made them do weird things in the old circuits. If I'd been supporting pianos, I'd've made completely new replacement boards with nothing in common with the old except the mounting points -- and I'd've done it again every six or seven years.
Dan Wilson
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