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#139660 - 08/13/01 09:31 AM
Re: Question about Polyphony
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Senior Member
Registered: 06/25/99
Posts: 16735
Loc: Benton, LA, USA
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Let me add a couple of cents worth...I know we're getting away from the original string on polyphony, but since we're discussing music stores . . .
There are only 4 music stores in the Shreveport area. One of them is very chuch-oriented. They have pianos, organs, a few Korg synths, sound systems, but no arranger keyboards.
Another is strictly guitars, amps, p.a.'s, no arrangers.
Then there is a piano store that does carry one Technics KN6000. They are nice folks, but they don't know anything about how to work it. They offered me a one-time deal of $5000. if I bought it "today"! As far as I know, they've had it about 6 or 7 months, apparently waiting for an ignorant, rich little old lady to buy it.
The other store is the one I work with. They have a large department dedicated to pianos, synths and keyboards. Over the years they have always stocked some arranger keyboards. In fact during the 80's they were a big item. I often went in for a few months at Christmas to help demo and sell them.
They still stock Yamaha arrangers and they do have a young man that is knowledgeable to demo them. (Sometimes his demos turn into concerts, but at least he knows quite a bit about them). Being good friends with the owner, I can tell you his problems and concerns with this department.
There is quite a bit of interest in the low and mid range arrangers. Customers are shown the features and given fair prices.
Most of them do not buy at the first visit.
Instead they search the internet for "deals". They can go directly across the street to Circuit City and get really low prices on whatever couple of Yamahas or Cascios that are in stock. They don't have to have a demo because the guy at the music store has already spent a couple of hours doing that. Or they can order off the internet. The music store will match most any price, but often on the lower-end units the 8 1/2 percent sales tax puts the price too high. It's that tight.
The higher end units have many of the same problems, except they are not available locally anywhere else. My friend is reluctant to stock many keyboards because the profit margin is low. The time taken to demo a $500 keyboard, that you might make $50 profit on, could be spent marketing a 9-foot Yamaha Grand, or a $3000. p.a. system, either of which has significantly more profit built in. He doesn't stock the top-end units at all, preferring not to tie up $2000 per unit in such a low-demand, low-profit situation.
I suppose if the volume of keyboard sales were higher, a store could live with a very small profit margin (that's what the internet stores depend on, and some of them do not even have physical showrooms, salesmen, delivery trucks, sales tax, etc to worry about).
Of the higher end keyboards that they sell, I'm probably responsible for 75% of them simply because people hear me play them and ask where to to get one. I'll get them a price and the store will order the keyboard. Believe me, this is only two or three a year.
I suspect these and other similar factors are among the reasons you don't see many stores stocking the arranger keyboards. The exceptions, such as George and Dan, are stores in larger markets that become specialists in this area. I also suspect that George and Dan would have similar problems if they relied strictly on local traffic, instead of augmenting their operations with internet sales, but I don't know that to be fact.
What the local stores have to offer that the chains and internet stores can't is customer service. The question is, is it worth the time and expense necessary to provide this when the same effort provides more profit when directed to other areas of music.
On a related subject, I think the tremendous success of the Peavey company is in large part due to the fact that they protect their dealers by not allowing internet sales of their equipment. Their gear is modestly priced, well-made equipment. Most of it carries a suggested retail markup of 100%. Of course not much is sold at that markup, but at least there is room for a dealer to give discounts and still make a profit.
Maybe these rambling thoughts will either shed a little light on the subject or at least make us more tolerant in our quest for the perfect arranger.
DonM
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DonM
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#139665 - 08/25/01 03:56 PM
Re: Question about Polyphony
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Member
Registered: 12/28/99
Posts: 86
Loc: Shreveport, LA, USA
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Like Don Mason, I live in Shreveport, and have a pretty good idea which stores he referred to in his post. (The store with the KN6000, BTW, has just put it on “sale” for “only” $3495!) What he describes about competent music stores working hard to demo a new unit only to have the customer milk them for info then go buy it on the Internet or at Circuit City echoes what used to happen with early personal computers such as the Commodore 64. The C64 got popular because of the expertise of dedicated computer stores (remember those?), but once they had blazed the trail, Commodore started selling them to department stores at prices so low that said chains could sell them for less than the computer stores could buy them! There was no way they could stay in business. How’s that for gratitude? Note that Commodore enjoyed a brief surge in popularity as a result of those actions, but where is it today? Gone. I think Æsop told a fable about this — something about killing a goose that laid yellow metallic eggs. To add insult to injury, very often people would come into such a store, ask lots of questions, take up valuable time with demos, and then go buy at the deparment store (the Internet didn’t exist yet). And then they would have the gall to come back and ask the computer store to help them out with questions and support that the department store (of course) couldn’t do! A similar situation happened with the mid-range line of Yamaha PSRs (3#0–5#0 models): people would come into the music store Don and I like, play around with them, then go buy one at Service Merchandise or on the Internet at prices far lower than the music store could possibly offer. Often the same people would then come back and expect to get support from the music store! Anyway, during this time, I came up with an idea and told it to the owner of one of the few Commodore-only computer stores at the time. It may apply here as well. The basic idea is to offer excellent post-sales service and support free to anyone who purchases at your store. You will answer their questions, help them set it up, etc. Most of you probably do this anyway. Now here’s the kicker: also offer this same support package to anyone who comes into your store, takes up your time, then goes and buys off the Net or wherever, and then comes back and expects support, let them have it — at a price. Oh, I’d say twice to thrice as much as they “saved” by buying elsewhere would be fair. This would more than make up for your lost profit. Once they paid this, you consider them as if they had bought it at your store. And make it clear that the same deal will happen with the next model they want to buy: they get the support free if they buy it from you, or else they have to pay much more than they would “save” if they didn’t, to get the same level of support. It doesn’t take a math whiz to see which would be the better deal for them. 
On the original topic re: polyphony: the answers given here were very good. I just wanted to make it plain that the polyphony is counted by tone generating element, not by note, and as has been stated, most keyboards have many (if not most) voices using more than one element per note for a “phatter” sound. Only thin solo sounds (such as, say, a solo oboe) are likely to use a single element. Also, the elements remain in use from the time a note begins until the time it has totally finished sounding, which, in the case of a sustained sound such as a piano with damper pedal down, chimes, guitar, etc., can be a substantial amount of time after you have released the key! This is why arpeggios with sustain can very quickly eat up your polyphony! When a device runs out of polyphony, it usually stops the least-recently-released notes first, on the idea that their sustains would’ve decayed further and so hopefully they’re already so soft by then that their sudden stop wouldn’t be too noticeable. Of course, this may not always be the case: different sounds have different delay times. In country music, you may have an acoustic guitar and a banjo both playing arpeggiated “picking” chord patterns. But the guitar has a much longer sustain than the banjo, so if the above rule is used, then guitar notes may be cut off even when they“re still much louder than more recently-released banjo notes! Smarter keyboards would take that into account, and drop the ones whose amplitudes have faded the most, regardless of how long it has been since they were released (or even if they had not been released at all: instruments such as guitars, pianos, etc. will eventually fade all the way to silence even if you never release the key!).
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