Re: dt harmony-central repeater review

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 10:17 AM 9/22/2001, Mark Sottilaro wrote:
>  Kim did not decide to publish my review, and
>that's fine, he's the editor... he's also the man who writes/wrote the
>software for the EDP.  Conflict of interest?  There's the possibility of 
>it,
>but I don't see it.

hold on, what? I never made any such decision! I have several Repeater 
reviews that I have received for the web site, including yours Mark. Some 
are positive, some negative, some balanced. In fact, I thought yours was 
probably the best I've received. I just don't have time in my life right 
now to be updating web sites every day, so I have to wait until I do have 
that time to put it together. Please don't take that as meaning I decided 
not to use something! They will all get up there eventually, with the 
possible exception of the other review I mentioned where I have some 
issues 
with it. I also frequently ask people questions about their reviews to 
give 
them an opportunity to revise it and make it as complete as possible. I do 
this because I hope to make the reviews on Looper's Delight as useful to 
the looping community as possible.

And I definitely recognize my own conflicts of interest in this. That is 
why you won't see any reviews of mine published on the LD web site, 
although I do sometimes make comments on the list. I assume that comments 
I 
make on the list can be easily challenged or addressed by anybody who 
wants 
to do that. And indeed, that happens. That is one reason why I don't 
moderate anything here.  I've also never withheld anything from publishing 
on the site because of any interests of opinions of mine. I try to keep 
these things as separate as I am able to. Indeed, the biggest conflict I 
have is my time, in weighing the time I spend on LD vs. my current job at 
a 
really intense startup vs. work for Aurisis and the Echoplex vs. my own 
personal life. The only thing that actually makes me any money out of 
those 
four is my job, so that's where most of the time goes. :-)

It goes deeper than just my background of involvement in the EDP, as I do 
receive money for advertising on Looper's Delight from a variety of 
companies whose products are discussed here. Since I've been actively 
seeking such revenues in the past six months or so as a means to pay the 
growing costs of the site, the amounts have been getting larger. (Not very 
much though. :-( I still lose quite a bit of money on all of this.) So I 
have conflicts of interest there as well, where I need to try to maintain 
integrity and honesty of the site while receiving wildly varying amounts 
of 
money from various companies represented there. I desperately need that 
income to pay for things, so I frequently find myself questioning my own 
actions and whether they are influenced by money promised or received, or 
likewise, whether they might threaten future income that I need. My 
approach so far has been to continue being myself, because I think 
anything 
else is dishonest. I also think that the site is only interesting to 
people 
in the world so long as it is honest and informative, and that maintaining 
that will keep people coming, which will then attract more advertising 
money to pay for it. I think people can see through bullshit pretty 
easily, 
so I don't try to give them any. But I do continue asking myself these 
questions, and you can feel free to do the same. I would rather put 
everything out there for people to make their own judgements.

In the case of the Repeater, I actually own two of them, so I'm probably 
more invested in Electrix and the Repeater than most people here. So if 
I'm 
an owner and a user of something, I guess I think I should get to speak my 
opinions of it same as anybody else. In fact, I think the cost of those 
Repeaters is greater than any money I've ever personally earned from LD or 
the EDP. (both of which are things I've spent far more on than I've ever 
earned.)  so where does that leave me? :-)

oh, BTW, it is Matthias who mainly writes the Echoplex software, and 
occasionally Eric. I don't do software, just hardware and business stuff.


>I was able to duplicate the problems that Kim found
>easily.  Was he a bit emotional about the Repeater's problems?  Sure, but 
>the
>EDPs throne is being challenged for it's first time.  The EDP is his 
>baby, so
>of course he'll be emotional, but at least he was accurate.

That is probably a truthful assessment, although the EDP has been getting 
challenged for years for some reason or another. I did have a whole post 
of 
good things to say about the repeater too:
http://www.loopers-delight.com/LDarchive/200109/msg00353.html

I basically like the repeater, and think it's a great product, although 
with some flaws. But I do think the looping market is really confused 
about 
what the Repeater is all about. To me that is the main source of 
frustration. After using them both, I find the Repeater and EDP don't have 
very much in common, so I don't really see them as much in competition. It 
is only in a confused market that they compete.

Some people seem to have convinced themselves that the Repeater is the 
same 
type of device as the echoplex or jamman or dl-4, etc., and bought it for 
those reasons or as a replacement for those things. They want it to be an 
echoplex/jamman performance-oriented looper with new features added. 
Repeater isn't like that, and when they try to use it that way they get 
very frustrated and have some really negative reactions. People who grok 
Repeater as more of a recording or remix tool based in looping principles 
seem to like it (and don't seem to understand where the negative reactions 
come from). Likewise, people who never understood that the echoplex was 
entirely designed as a live performance instrument and instead tried to 
use 
it as a recording tool have often been frustrated by it as well.

In the current case, I think Electrix could probably do a better job of 
setting people's expectations for what the Repeater is all about. So far 
they have had a tendency to promise everything to everybody, which they 
obviously can't deliver on. And they haven't done anything to stop people 
thinking it would be the ultra-jamman or something like that. Leaving the 
market confused probably results in better sales in the short term, but 
some of those buyers are going to be unhappy and that comes back to hurt 
Electrix. In the long term I think it is better if everybody who buys the 
Repeater understands it to begin with, and then gets what they thought 
they 
were getting.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com