Does anyone know the story behind losing the code on some of the classics? Was there a fire or something? That just seems so strange.
Its a story as legendary & true as Atari dumping ET cartridges in a desert landfill. Which BTW there's an excellent documentary about.
Not sure anyone knows all the details but the design loss was referenced here just a week or two ago on the UAD 224, where they apparently had some but not all of the original pieces. Think that story went down on the UAD forum long ago, that it was about 50% direct port & 50% filling in the blanks reconstruction. Something like that. Not sure of exact percentages.
There's also a really long & really, really old thread on Lexicon verbs at the purple place... that, if you wanna geek out & really understand what's happening under the hood of all these boxes is worth a read. I'll try to find it but I also believe the design loss was mentioned there.
Gotta remember it was a different era. My impression is most of the work was done on paper... spiral bound notebooks & file cabinets before it went to circa 1980 computer systems. Think about what was state of the art in 1978 and it certainly wasn't cloud computing & unlimited storage. That was Star Trek science fiction yet, today its normal.
Plus I just get the overall feeling that once the Harman group started to absorb these companies like Lexicon & dbx that lots of things were dumped...
For one thing, also long ago in a galaxy far away... in the early days of the purple place there were a few of us trying to identify variations of the good old dbx 160 and wow, cool here's a guy from DBX joining in.
Couple of us asked about the 160's that were made in Japan... dbx guy says "we never made them in Japan" - well yeah ya did. I have two in my hands here's a picture!
He was shocked and after some digging said they had no records at all of building in Japan. Where did those go?
Another factor, I think at least from today's perspective is that now we're kinda interested in the history of all this old production gear. Back then nobody really kept long term records... it was all, even something like the PCM60 kinda custom built for a niche industry. It wasn't like popping out $299 reverb boxes to stack up for a Memorial Day sale at GuiTarget...
