Elektron-Users

yeah, they did not tell me that either.

OrsanKart:
its not the knobs - its the electronic piece that the knob sits on, so its not going to look anymore unique when its done. However, you could put different knobs on there if you wanted to - they are standard D shaft.

I find all this interesting.

the elektron units are built in ESTONIA,.... if my stoner memory serves me correct, anytime PRICE is called into question, or has been, its the swedish rates that are brought up. which are high, by the way.

as far as I know, servicing is carried out in sweden, but the manufacturing is carried out in the questionable Estonia.

....


what does this mean, in the context of this thread ?
I dunno.


Make an order for a MD, and make a request for some replacement encoders - and see which comes faster

b0unce wrote:
the elektron units are built in ESTONIA,.... if my stoner memory serves me correct,


Yes, partly in Estonia (final assembly, quality inspections etc). PCB's are mounted both in Sweden and Estonia, and there is no quality difference between where they are made. If I'd say anything I'd say they are more rigid about quality in Estonia. Just because it's a small country bordering to Russia doesn't say they don't give a shit about what they are doing. I'd say Estonians are a very proud and hard working people.

Most custom part, such as casing, front aluminium plate, front glass are made around in the Nordic countries, mosrtly Sweden and Denmark. The PSU is Danish/German. If you look at the back of a new Machinedrum or Monomachine you will see "Made in EU" which more reflects the different parts collected and finally assembled in Estonia and shipped back to us.

All made from our specifications of course.

The SidStation has always been made in Sweden only.

The people working at the large factory in Estonia are not just some bums picked up from the street. The education level of the project leaders and workers are much higher than what you would find in most other countries. We have a lot of cool ex-atomic engineers etc working for us at the production factory.


anytime PRICE is called into question, or has been, its the swedish rates that are brought up. which are high, by the way.


If we're gonna keep on going we need to make a living out of Elektron and work full time. It means we need to pay Swedish sales tax, profit tax, you-name-it-taxes, rent, insurances and salaries with yet again associated taxes.


as far as I know, servicing is carried out in sweden, but the manufacturing is carried out in the questionable Estonia.


There is nothing questionable about Estonia or the Estonian factory. I've never met more professional and well educated people in my life. The final official visual and functional inspection team does an unquestionable job after getting the right instructions. And the lower prices per hour means we can afford them to spend more time checking each unit out. Then we just do a final function test before shipping it out from the HQ.

The return rate is now rated in parts per thousand instead of 100s, which is a very good figure from what I know in the pro-music business.

Look at the back of most of your (at least non-pro) electronic devices, and I doubt you'll see anything else than some slave-workers country. That's the only way you can sell electronics at the prices you see today. But to do that you need a volume we can't provide (starting at 10k units a year, 100k is better).

Estonia is perfect for us. It's made it possible for us to keep the US price when the dollar now is no more half its value in comparison to what it was a couple of years ago. Although its starting to get tough now that the SEK is rising against both the dollar and the Euro...


Make an order for a MD, and make a request for some replacement encoders - and see which comes faster

We keep spare parts in stock of course in the HQ and in the US service centre, so it should be quite equal.

The hesitance against just throwing away a couple of rotary encoders at some guy wanting to save some money to do the job himself is because it's not easy to understand the complexity of the operation. It took us a while to figure how to do it best, and still it takes us half to an hour to do a full 9 encoder shift. And it's easy to destroy your IO board in the process if you don't know exactly what you're doing. We're simply not set up for DIY kits with step-by-step instructions.

Support get around 5-30 emails a day, and even though we try to treat everybody as individuals I can understand that we rather recommend a service centre to resolve the problem than be stuck in a step by step discussion while the poor user who thought it would be an easy operation to exchange them ends up fucking up the whole machine.

There are some who are indeed qualified to exchange the rotaries themselves though, so I assume Mr. Threadstarter have been overlooked unfortunately. It was more than half a year ago, more like a year ago when we decided where to place our US service centre, so it was before Jon entered the brave support seat, so he doesn't know that history. (We went much for a good record, many years of pro experience etc)

It's not so easy to tell real experienced people from think-it's-gonna-be-no-problems people right away, so first advice will mostly be to ship it in for repair.

Daniel

BTW. You won't find our rotary encoders in any standard electronics catalogue as they are specially made for us in Taiwan. If you find something that you believe is better and compatible though, let us know! After testing almost all available rotaries on the world market I doubt it's possible though it can take more than the ones we're using.

daniel wrote:



anytime PRICE is called into question, or has been, its the swedish rates that are brought up. which are high, by the way.


If we're gonna keep on going we need to make a living out of Elektron and work full time. It means we need to pay Swedish sales tax, profit tax, you-name-it-taxes, rent, insurances and salaries with yet again associated taxes.


as far as I know, servicing is carried out in sweden, but the manufacturing is carried out in the questionable Estonia.


There is nothing questionable about Estonia or the Estonian factory. I've never met more professional and well educated people in my life. The final official visual and functional inspection team does an unquestionable job after getting the right instructions. And the lower prices per hour means we can afford them to spend more time checking each unit out.

doh.., thanks for the post - always informative.
what I was calling into question tho was the COSTS, not the quality...I'm sorry I didnt make that clearer.

I just remember discussing the price tags before, and I dont recall estonian manufacturing getting a mention - only sweden and its high labour costs. so I was led to believe that part of the reason elektron stuff has such a high price point was partially due to swedish labour rates, in the same discussion outsourcing estonian labour in the manufacturing process wasnt mentioned. It was someone else, not affiliated with elektron, who mentioned that - somewhere in this forum, in an unrelated thread I believe. I forget how they came to know this ?

meh, I'm just a skeptic at the end of the day, I have to question everything. but one thing i dont have to question is the quality of this stuff, its top class.

the encoders are bound to give eventually tho, how much is it to have those replaced ? 100 euro ?

thanks daniel - that response puts a lot of light on the situation. I guess it was over a year ago - wow! Time flies.

if you tell me the specs of the encoder, I can try and source it myself - however, I would rather just put the original in.

Its my fault that the thing broke - something fell on it, and I just got it back from a $500+ UW uprgade, so yeah, I am looking to do this on the cheap. I am pretty confident that I can do the work in under an hour - if I get in there and see its not possible without putting the thing at risk - yeah, I will send it out.

When a knob broke off of my virus, I had a similar interaction with access. They never ended up sending me the knob, but they did send me a guide to disassembly right away. I think if people are willing to fix things (confident enough not to mess with things out of their depth) they should be able to do so. Its not like I am putting in a UW upgrade here - its just an encoder. Maybe 3-6 solder joints total plus some delicate disassembly - with the proper tools and knowhow, its really not a huge job.

Looking forward to that email monday!

daniel wrote:

BTW. You won't find our rotary encoders in any standard electronics catalogue as they are specially made for us in Taiwan. If you find something that you believe is better and compatible though, let us know! After testing almost all available rotaries on the world market I doubt it's possible though it can take more than the ones we're using.

Wow, that is quite surprising. The rotary encoders are the one thing quality-wise on the Machinedrum that makes me very nervous.

I was simply attempting to disassemble my Machinedrum, as something was rattling inside and I wanted to deal to it before it shorted something out.

Step number #1 is take all the knobs off. Bad move! Took 3 off, just fine. Got to the fourth one, and the it took a bit more force than the first 3...and that force pulled the shaft right out of the encoder. The small plastic clips that hold the shaft in simply broke off.

I figured I would persevere, as 1 was just bad luck...wrong! Number 5 was OK, then number 6 did the same thing. Pulled right out.

At this point I was still no closer to opening up the box, and retrieving the rattling piece.

As you can imaging, this was a moment of great sadness. A mangled Machinedrum, simply from trying to pull the knobs off. Something I have done to 100 of electronic gadgets over the last 30 years...and this has never happened before.

Now this is when the superb support from Elektron kicked in...they send me 2 replacement shafts straight away...no cost! Now the installation of said items is just a matter of sticking them into the hold of the encode, no soldering required, which I can understand them being nervous about providing parts for.

My Machinedrum manual says the internal battery will last 6 years....what happens when I need to replace that? How many encoder shafts will break :-o

daniel wrote:

BTW. You won't find our rotary encoders in any standard electronics catalogue as they are specially made for us in Taiwan. If you find something that you believe is better and compatible though, let us know! After testing almost all available rotaries on the world market I doubt it's possible though it can take more than the ones we're using.

Wow, that is quite surprising. The rotary encoders are the one thing quality-wise on the Machinedrum that makes me very nervous.

I was simply attempting to disassemble my Machinedrum, as something was rattling inside and I wanted to deal to it before it shorted something out.

Step number #1 is take all the knobs off. Bad move! Took 3 off, just fine. Got to the fourth one, and the it took a bit more force than the first 3...and that force pulled the shaft right out of the encoder. The small plastic clips that hold the shaft in simply broke off.

I figured I would persevere, as 1 was just bad luck...wrong! Number 5 was OK, then number 6 did the same thing. Pulled right out.

At this point I was still no closer to opening up the box, and retrieving the rattling piece.

As you can imaging, this was a moment of great sadness. A mangled Machinedrum, simply from trying to pull the knobs off. Something I have done to 100 of electronic gadgets over the last 30 years...and this has never happened before.

Now this is when the superb support from Elektron kicked in...they send me 2 replacement shafts straight away...no cost! Now the installation of said items is just a matter of sticking them into the hold of the encode, no soldering required, which I can understand them being nervous about providing parts for.

My Machinedrum manual says the internal battery will last 6 years....what happens when I need to replace that? How many encoder shafts will break :-o

regarding the apparent fragility of those knobs, that's the reason I'd really like to see a software alternative to the "push + rotate" action implemented in the next OS.
possibly a solution that could be used with parameter locks as well. in other words, keeping in mind that we have ONLY two arms and usually just 10 fingers...

lcvl wrote:
regarding the apparent fragility of those knobs, that's the reason I'd really like to see a software alternative to the "push + rotate" action implemented in the next OS.
possibly a solution that could be used with parameter locks as well. in other words, keeping in mind that we have ONLY two arms and usually just 10 fingers...

I have the exact same concerns as you, and suggested a solution (swapping the "rotate" and "push+rotate" encoder functionalities in software) last year, and apparently so did Divi even before that. But it is a futile suggestion since Elektron has already stated they won't do it.

Maybe a better suggestion is to get the "push+rotate" functionality an alternative way by holding "Function" while turning "rotate". What do you think?

http://www.elektron-users.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=347&forum=1&post_id=5257#forumpost5257

synthy wrote:
I have the exact same concerns as you, and suggested a solution (swapping the "rotate" and "push+rotate" encoder functionalities in software) last year, and apparently so did Divi even before that. But it is a futile suggestion since Elektron has already stated they won't do it.

Maybe a better suggestion is to get the "push+rotate" functionality an alternative way by holding "Function" while turning "rotate". What do you think?

http://www.elektron-users.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=347&forum=1&post_id=5257#forumpost5257

Function + rotate already has an important function.

I think Elektron should scrap the push-button encoders and use sturdier standard encoders with an acceleration algorithm (values increase more quickly when you turn the knob quickly). I'd happily pay to have the encoders in my MD and MnM replaced with something that will last longer. I'm already on my second set of encoders on the MD anyway