Ahhhh rats...

As reported in the Korea Times: bq. Young Chang Files for Bankruptcy Young Chang, the nation�'s leading piano maker, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday as the company failed to honor 300 million won in maturing bills. bq. The company said that it could not honor the bills due to a worsened business environment and lack of extra cash flow. bq. However, some market watchers speculated that the piano manufacturer may have intentionally filed for bankruptcy to protest against the Fair Trade Commission�'s (FTC) decision earlier this month, ordering Samick Musical Instruments to sell its stake in Young Chang. bq. Last March, Samick, the nation�'s second largest piano maker, acquired 48.6 percent in Young Chang to become the largest shareholder, thus creating a dominant domestic piano manufacturer. The issue here is that Samick is a junk piano maker (their high-end lines are OK) and the Young Chang line is pretty much cheap synthesizers. Their product line strives for low development costs, low BOM (bill of materials in manufacturing -- ie: low parts count), minimal after-the-sale support, minimal updates (ie: future software developments). All this would be fine -- there is a lot of market 'churn' among musical instrument makers, companies come and go -- BUT -- Young Chang also happens to own a crown jewel -- Kurzweil. There is a fascinating story about it's development. Ray Kurzweil got his start building reading machines for the blind in the 1970's. He developed a very powerful speech synthesizer (this at the time when most speech syntheses needed a mini-computer or sounded like a robot with a head cold). One of his clients for this machine was Stevie Wonder and as Ray was describing the new speech synth features, Stevie asked him if it could also do music. The rest, as they say, is history... (I lived in Boston when these systems were initially being developed and knew one of the engineers well.) Kurzweil synthesizers have a steep learning curve but they are incredibly deep. They are basically a music computer and Young Chang has been wonderful about coming out with updates that not only add new sounds but add new synthesis features. The original hardware architecture is about 15-18 years old but it is modern with the updates. I own several of these machines and am deeply saddened by this news. The majority of companies these days are moving away from hardware synthesis and towards a Windows box with a sound card and their synthesis software. You _can_ tell the difference... Sigh...