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We were talking Ensoniq keyboards in another thread. I used to be one of their repair stations. First at a largish music store, then in my own shop. In fact that was my only positive experience with them. When I left the music store, I wrote a detailed letter to Steve Coscia, their service manager. As I recall, he had been a decent fellow, and I believe was trying, but the company was so screwed up... SO I wrote the riot act, spelled out all the various frustrations I had had the previous 8 years working on their stuff. He called me to say he understood, but the company was what it was. he asked what I was going to do, and I said open my own shop. He then asked if I wanted to be one of their service centers at my new shop. Really, I just chewed you out for problems, and you are trying to keep me? BUt I went ahead and signed on. That lasted as long as they did. It was worth the hassle to get the customers coming in.
One issue was they wanted to do everything by board swaps. No matter what, board swap. They made detailed manuals with all these procedures that determined what board a problem was on, then they expected you to order that board. Main CPU board, power supply board, display./control panel board, keybed. If you had something as simple as a busted jack, they wanted you to swap the board. yes, of course I have bags of those Jalco jacks, but that wasn;t the point. You could not, even as a service center, buy even a jack. Bad little tactile switch? New board. Bad Vreg IC, new board. ANyone worth their salt can figure those parts out, but what if you diagnose a bad Curtiss chip? Not hard to do, but you won't find them at the store. and they won;t sell you one. Or a key assigner, or a mask ROM.
SO if they HAVE the boards, you order one, and a few days later I'd have it. SO much for same day service in my shop. They charge my account $500 for the board and pay $400 for the dud. At the store the manager used to come into my shop every so often screaming about the $5000 I owed Ensoniq. I'd have to explain those were charges that would be offset by credits for returns. SO the board costs me $100, E tells us we are to sell the thing for $150. SO I am supposed to tell the customer his simple repair is $150 for the board and keep a straight face.
To clarify, that was after warranty. Warranty repairs were credited the full $500.
But they only had so many boards in stock. If they were all out, you had to wait for duds to come in for them to repair before they could send it out to you. So much for prompt service. Sometimes the boards they sent were bad. More delay. I recall one coming in that had a bad Curtiss chip. So I took one from my old bad board to fix the new board. No thanks to them. And after a while, boards had cycled enough times they were getting shaky. I know I replaced some boards that had intermittent. And I have no doubt some of those boards were marked no problem found and cycled back out. So some other sucker got my intermittent. And I wound up getting new intermittent boards. Thanks...
The manuals were pathetic. Long, involved procedures to find a board swap. On the front it told us we'd need a screwdriver, an allen wrench, and a 100MHz scope. We found that amusing, because the manuals NEVER asked you to scope anything, in fact even the voltage readings were made for kids. It wouldn't just ask us to check the +5 and +15 and -15, it would tell us to put the black probe on pin 5 and the red probe on pin 12 of some connector. Best we could figure for the scope is that if we didn't have one, maybe we were not qualified to be techs... or something. It became shop humor here. One of the guys grabs a screwdriver to take the back off a speaker and someone would say "Don;t forget to take your 100MHz scope."
Little hardware annoyances. Phillips screws mostly, but the top panel was held by 2.5mm allen screws. What was wrong with phillips up there too? And those weird collar nuts for the jacks, not convenient to line up.
Really irked me when they wanted $100 for a collection of schematics for just their oldest models.
But what really got me was handling problems. ANy company looks good when things move along as normal. The measure of a company is how it handles problems. In my entire relationship with that company NOT ONE SINGLE TIME was a problem issue successfully resolved. They'd have accounting telling me I never returned some board, so I owed them $500, and I'd have to copy the UPS delivery record showing someone of such and such name at Ensoniq had signed for it. MOnths later they are still trying to get the $500 off the books. Order one thing, get another, then they ship the right thing, and now i am billed for two things. Orders that are never filled. Months go by, no order comes. We have no record of your order, they say. Then how come I have an order number YOU issued to me? Not one single time.
One issue was they wanted to do everything by board swaps. No matter what, board swap. They made detailed manuals with all these procedures that determined what board a problem was on, then they expected you to order that board. Main CPU board, power supply board, display./control panel board, keybed. If you had something as simple as a busted jack, they wanted you to swap the board. yes, of course I have bags of those Jalco jacks, but that wasn;t the point. You could not, even as a service center, buy even a jack. Bad little tactile switch? New board. Bad Vreg IC, new board. ANyone worth their salt can figure those parts out, but what if you diagnose a bad Curtiss chip? Not hard to do, but you won't find them at the store. and they won;t sell you one. Or a key assigner, or a mask ROM.
SO if they HAVE the boards, you order one, and a few days later I'd have it. SO much for same day service in my shop. They charge my account $500 for the board and pay $400 for the dud. At the store the manager used to come into my shop every so often screaming about the $5000 I owed Ensoniq. I'd have to explain those were charges that would be offset by credits for returns. SO the board costs me $100, E tells us we are to sell the thing for $150. SO I am supposed to tell the customer his simple repair is $150 for the board and keep a straight face.
To clarify, that was after warranty. Warranty repairs were credited the full $500.
But they only had so many boards in stock. If they were all out, you had to wait for duds to come in for them to repair before they could send it out to you. So much for prompt service. Sometimes the boards they sent were bad. More delay. I recall one coming in that had a bad Curtiss chip. So I took one from my old bad board to fix the new board. No thanks to them. And after a while, boards had cycled enough times they were getting shaky. I know I replaced some boards that had intermittent. And I have no doubt some of those boards were marked no problem found and cycled back out. So some other sucker got my intermittent. And I wound up getting new intermittent boards. Thanks...
The manuals were pathetic. Long, involved procedures to find a board swap. On the front it told us we'd need a screwdriver, an allen wrench, and a 100MHz scope. We found that amusing, because the manuals NEVER asked you to scope anything, in fact even the voltage readings were made for kids. It wouldn't just ask us to check the +5 and +15 and -15, it would tell us to put the black probe on pin 5 and the red probe on pin 12 of some connector. Best we could figure for the scope is that if we didn't have one, maybe we were not qualified to be techs... or something. It became shop humor here. One of the guys grabs a screwdriver to take the back off a speaker and someone would say "Don;t forget to take your 100MHz scope."
Little hardware annoyances. Phillips screws mostly, but the top panel was held by 2.5mm allen screws. What was wrong with phillips up there too? And those weird collar nuts for the jacks, not convenient to line up.
Really irked me when they wanted $100 for a collection of schematics for just their oldest models.
But what really got me was handling problems. ANy company looks good when things move along as normal. The measure of a company is how it handles problems. In my entire relationship with that company NOT ONE SINGLE TIME was a problem issue successfully resolved. They'd have accounting telling me I never returned some board, so I owed them $500, and I'd have to copy the UPS delivery record showing someone of such and such name at Ensoniq had signed for it. MOnths later they are still trying to get the $500 off the books. Order one thing, get another, then they ship the right thing, and now i am billed for two things. Orders that are never filled. Months go by, no order comes. We have no record of your order, they say. Then how come I have an order number YOU issued to me? Not one single time.
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