At the Amersfoort meet (Mk 2 - report and web site coming RSN ), Rob gave a spiel to all attendees regarding the problems of changing over design, production, marketing and sales to essentially another organisation.

Basically, all activities that had been underway at the time of the buy-out just stopped. Designs for remotes, tuners, empeg head units all had to be transferred to a new production and purchasing group, which was a big benefit - it allowed the guys at empeg to get rid of all the hassles associated with production, and should lead to easier availability (bigger buyng power), better reliability, and fewer quality problems.

However, there was a downside. Transfer takes time. Setting up again takes time. Preparing a new sales mechanism takes time. SB's normal business practice of using outside contractors to do specific jobs takes time. Net result, a big delay in things that were quite a long way down the road. It's debatable if leaving it with empeg would have sped things up.

The bottom line is a number promises:

- no more promises about unfulfillable dates.
- 1.03 and the tuner module will be available together.
- when they are available for release, the European shop will be open to sell them.
- the promised date is middle of July, which is now pretty concrete.

Consider the following: we did see and use physical examples of the tuner at the meet (it even resulted in a few tuner bugs related to RDS being spotted). Since the tuner is electrically functional and has been productionised, it is in all intents ready for delivery. Since 1.03 (currently in Beta) is required to make use of it, it can't be let go until 1.03 comes out of Beta. A limited number of tuners have been circulated to alpha testers and the gross bugs are out. The rest of the world has recently started testing what is effectively a regression test of 1.02 + tuner functions to check that nothing has been broken by the addition of tuner. Due to other work obligations and the fact that there are still apparently alpha-level bugs to resolve, 1.1 is still not in a Beta (or other) releasable state, so 1.03 is the stop gap to put the tuner out. It will, however, follow on the heels of 1.03, which should be quite short-lived.

So - the conclusion is: the ball is in your court as much as it is in SB's and their sales people; the faster you dig out bugs prior to the mid July date, the more likely it is that it can be got out of the door on time, to the great pleasure of a significant number of people, not the least of whom will be Rob, Hugo and the boys in Cambridge...

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015