Originally posted by Diki:
AFAIK, Ketron don't offshore their production. It is still, I understand, being made in the EU, in Italy, right?
The reason Roland, Yamaha and Korg have managed to keep prices low is to manufacture them in China, with their artificially low wages. Unless Ketron take this step (very difficult to do - look at all the labor problems Roland had moving arranger production from Italy to China), I doubt you are going to see a big drop in their prices. You want a state of the art audio/MIDI arranger, with features no other arranger has, and you want it CHEAPER? 
What is being smoked by some of our members? 
Beleive me if i tell you that all the components come from south eastern production, all they do in Ittaly is assembly of the systems and software install..
The high prices for Ketron are mainly because of the hugh investment in new technologies (Auio styles) research and development combined with the relatively low number of systems they sell.. And espescially this major part of the cost needs to be done in europe as they have the knowledge.
Electonics hardware (components) is becomming cheeper every day, so the hardware can't be a main part of the costs.. its the software development
Since Yamaha sells much more units they can spread out the development costs of new technologies over much more keyboards and so it has less influence on the price..
For instance Yamaha's development investment intoo super articulation sounds will make them money in Tyros, top models PSR and Motif... For Ketron there is just a relatively low number of Auya's to gaet their investments back..
So all in all, Ketron is to small a company to compete with Roland Korg and Yamaha based on proces, and they can only sell their products if they have a substantiall better quallity then the competition.
Previous Topic
Index
