Reply To: dsp 4000 software upgrade

[skywriter]

Not that I have any reputation on this board, but I’ve been a hardware/software designer for the 35 years, and what Nick states is quite the normal of state of affairs even in fortune 500 companies even selling million+ dollar products. Sadly, design archival of mixed systems (hardware, firmware, software) has been a complicated, unstatndardized, and mostly unsuccessful process for much of the electronics industry, which has relied heavily on thier long time engineers memory to sort it all out in the end. Once you lose those engineers, anyone is hard pressed to make heads or tails out of anything but the most recent shipping product. After 10 years, you’re lucky if you can find 1/2 of the design files.

With this in mind, it’s unfair to single out Eventide alone in this. If anything they should get kudos for producing products like the H3000 D/SE, which still has an incredible reputation in the vintage equipment area. I still have one, and it’s brilliant! As is my GTR4000, and H8000FW, and H9’s of course 🙂

Quote:

I am obliged to say that supporting 20 year old equipment is difficult – most of the designers are no longer with us, and are indeed playing with sound elsewhere. Very few of our present staff know anything about these units. In addition, acquiring replacements for obsolete parts is difficult, many of the only being available through dubious sources on the “gray market.”