Re: Re[2]: Selling stuff over the internet

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

[buying used through the mail]
>Never have I had a bad piece of gear.

Obviously this is anecdotal.  Some people
won't get burned and some people will.

I appear to have gotten burned with my
Vortex.  It's possible that this problem
has only recently developed, but I'm quite
sure I'd never bothered trying this before.

I finally (four months after buying it!)
decided to give its morphing capabilities
a work out--until now I just morphed between
existing patches.  (And mostly I didn't
morph at all because I use it as a post-loop
processor.)

So I was going to morph between a patch
and "itself" (a variant of itself), so I
copied the patch from an A register to
a B register.

Lo and behold, I have discovered that this
Vortex flakes out on exactly this operation
(goodness knows this doesn't make any sense
as either a hardware problem or a software
problem, as far as I can see).  If a patch
is copied from A to B, it comes out entirely
messed up (and non-musical) in B--generally
either extremely muted and in (apparent) mono,
or loud and horribly (digitally?) clipped,
generally in a different way in L & R channels,
or it self-oscillates in some way producing
very loud randomly squiggling unmusical noise.
Sometimes, switching away to another patch and
then back changes the mode of the behavior.
Powering the Vortex down and back up doesn't
make any difference.

Copying from B to A does not exhibit this problem,
I believe.  I'm not sure how exhaustive my
testing was at the time.  Hmm, I'm not even
sure I ever copied from one B to another B.

Anyway, obviously, for Vortex and Jamman
you've got to buy used.  Caveat emptor, I
suppose.

Sean Barrett