lejonklou wrote:
This could be true in some cases, perhaps including the Keel. But in general I think it's incorrect. There is constant progress being made in electronics and other technologies that can be incorporated into new products. Developing a really good product today shouldn't take much more time or resources than it did 10 years ago (apart from the fact that regulations are more difficult to comply with these days). And because both tools and parts are now of higher quality, the resulting product is very likely to be better than the old one.
Mr. Lejonklou,
If I may elaborate (or perhaps comment on?) your above point:
As you know, I've worked in robotics, and that's a discipline that's equal parts electronics, software, and mechanical engineering (indeed it's usually the mechanical engineering aspects that trip up new entrants to the field -- get the ME a little wrong, and your control systems face all sorts of feedback distortions they were never designed to deal with...). And with ME, I would tend to agree with the Linn engineer's contention that as a piece of mechanical hardware becomes more refined, further improvements become progressively more difficult and expensive to devise.
With electronics (and indirectly with software), we have Moore's Law driving an historically unprecedented pace of technological innovation. Mechanical Engineering does not so emphatically benefit from Moore's Law: there are advances in simulation software and in fabrication/ assembly techniques that do speed the development process, but fundamentally we're still dealing with an "analog" hunk of metal (or wood, composite, fiber, etc.) that we have to cut, cast, hone, machine, fabricate, or otherwise physically process, and which will maddenly try to behave in the way it wants to behave, irrespective of what we've "designed" it to do. The extreme physicality of mechanical engineering means that, development tools notwithstanding, the pace of ME technological innovation far lags that seen in electronics or software, and indeed is arguably not orders of magnitude greater than what we've seen over the past few centuries.
As a result, I feel for Linn. Mechanical devices like the Keel can easily soak up hundreds and thousands of man-hours to develop, and yet they quickly draw scores of would-be copycats. The danger for our community (as audio and Linn enthusiasts) is that if enough business is lost to those copycats (irrespective of whether the copies are in fact as good as the originals), the R&D managers at Linn might turn a cold eye to future proposed improvements that center on mechanical bits (for those who have not worked in corporate R&D, such a scenario happens all the time: bright enthusiastic engineers identify a promising research avenue to pursue, and finance-constrained managers step in to halt the work if the innovations can't be protected). And for LP enthusiasts, that would be a shame....
-C
