Production
Despite the skilled talents of the manufacturing team, (such as Emerson/McCartney Moog technician Phil Pierce who worked on the attack / decay electronics), and a man by the name of 'Roger Rogers' who worked on design development, delays in actual production arose due to issues that became time consuming to solve properly. These included international voltage considerations, tape head alignment, and fitting 8 track tapes into a smaller and extremely robust case. The vertical mount of the tape cartridges initially made tapes prone to problems like jamming and wandering. Smaller tape loop lengths helped surmount this. Although the problems were solved it meant that essentially the B-90 Birotron was not made to a price and expensive metals and components were used in its manufacture. Wakeman stated in a 1978 interview with Keyboard magazine that the Birotron would have an extremely low profit margin because of it.
The use of expensive components, combined with fees for legal patents (to cover at least 2 versions of it, and a loop recording process which eliminated thumps in loop points), plus hiring musicians and locations to record sounds for the tapes, made the Birotron project an increasingly expensive venture.
The instrument was also made of highly unique parts as detailed in Dave Biro's 'Birogram' - a 1977 public relations release from Birotronics:
"After literally searching the world over for a motor that was efficient and reliable enough, we finally found one and only one that would do the job. It had really unbelievable specs and a really fine electronic tachometer that continually scans the speed and makes immediate adjustments, so that no matter what the load, the motor would still run at a very exacting constant speed...."
"The next problem was finding a drive shaft that was long enough, straight enough, and perfectly symmetrical. Off hand you wouldn't think this to be a problem, but surprisingly enough we again find only one manufacturer in the world that makes such an animal. To make a long story a bit shorter, we ran through a similar problem with almost each and every part that goes into the BiroTron. Also you must realize that in many cases we couldn't correct one problem until the preceding one was taken care of..."
"Early last fall we hired an ace mechanical engineer, Roger Rogers...He has spent about 2000 hours since then exploring every single aspect of the instrument...The initial circuits of the BiroTron were designed on a computer by England's top Moog technician Phil Pierce..."
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)