Brand Longevity

01-20-13: Erikt

Thanks for the Mac link, was interesting.

Best,

So now I'm in a bad mood because this thread got me thinking about my Squeezebox Touch...there's nothing quite like an extremely successful item being abandoned by bonehead manufacturers.

My system runs the gamut between one man band outfits (Ayre, Symphonic Line) and big corporation (Revel, a Harman brand).

Is there a risk that someday I could find myself possessing gear that is no longer easily repairable? Well sure. But the bottom line is you can't 100% anticipate the future and it's an individual assessment as to how to balance it against the present. My feeling is I could get hit by a truck next month, and then it wouldn't make a whit of difference if both Charlie Hansen and Rolf Gemein both choked on chicken bones the week after my demise. And if the wheel spins in the other direction, at least I'll have had the opportunity to experience the pleasure their gear provides, if not for as long as I might have wanted.

Back in the 70s I put myself through college by working in several different consumer electronics service departments.

Large companies that are still very much in business will often not have the part you need to service an older model! Don't think for a minute that that is something unique to high end!!

I used to really hate seeing Aiwa cassette decks as they would gun the spare parts only 5 years after the model was made. So you might need a small plastic part that had broken, something that only cost a few cents to make and the machine was unrepairable without it. I got pretty good at finding ways to put such parts back together with heat, wire and glue...

So when I started my company I made serviceability a high priority. That was because I might be gone someday but also because if we had to fix it, it would not be a nightmare :)

These days service is a lot trickier. It actually seems to me that getting tube stuff serviced is easier than solid state. Certain semiconductors that were easy to find 10 years ago are getting tricky to find! The IC industry in particular is very whimsical about what chips stay around and what don't. Try and find the ICs for a Technics SP-10 and you will see what I mean.

It's important to me, and my system reflects that. I don't really trust some of these high end companies...they're here to day, gone tomorrow.