Fractal VP4!

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USMC_Trev said:
You think he does that? He and his team do the design work and post manufacturing effort. It’s still too expensive to do everything in-house. The actual manufacturing is contracted out to China and elsewhere. He doesn’t tool up. All the parts are made elsewhere, assembled elsewhere. FAS does the quality control and shipping. Just like everyone else. His vendors roll manufacturing cost for any new tooling - and by the way there isn’t much: laser or water table cutting, laser etching faceplates, CCA manufacturing printing and populating - into their bid to get his business.
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We (and all the other manufacturers) must be doing it wrong because we most certainly have to tool up. The vendor doesn't eat the tooling. And lasers can't bend metal and mold plastic parts.

The costs to bring a product to market now are astronomical. People expect so much that it's becoming cost-prohibitive to introduce high-end products.
 
FractalAudio said:
We (and all the other manufacturers) must be doing it wrong because we most certainly have to tool up. The vendor doesn't eat the tooling. And lasers can't bend metal and mold plastic parts.

The costs to bring a product to market now are astronomical. People expect so much that it's becoming cost-prohibitive to introduce high-end products.
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I figured they rolled whatever cost into your per unit cost across the run. We do a lot of fabrication because we’re an rdt&e group and we do a lot of prototyping and iterating. Once that’s done though we’re getting everything from somewhere else unless it’s so proprietary that we can’t let those processes outside. We live in a COTS world and the margins are super-thin.

Then again I’m in the MIC and it’s kinda effed up out here. I tend to assume that the programmatic regimes I work under apply everywhere.
 
USMC_Trev said:
You think he does that? He and his team do the design work and post manufacturing effort. It’s still too expensive to do everything in-house. The actual manufacturing is contracted out to China and elsewhere. He doesn’t tool up. All the parts are made elsewhere, assembled elsewhere. FAS does the quality control and shipping. Just like everyone else. His vendors roll manufacturing cost for any new tooling - and by the way there isn’t much: laser or water table cutting, laser etching faceplates, CCA manufacturing printing and populating - into their bid to get his business. Buy or build often ends up being buy because it’s always cheaper to order xxx boards in a production run from a company that just does that. That’s why you see the pace of product life cycle that you see from the outside: the pre ordering period helps a company to set the number of parts to order fir the initial run, when you see them tun out, when you start to see B-stock units for sale on the site, all of that.
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Lot of assumptions there. I think Fractal's manufacturing costs are certainly non-zero. I can't speak to anything specific, but the sorts of figures I've seen can be staggering. It absolutely depends on the scale of the project, and it wouldn't surprise me if the total manufacturing setup costs for something like a VP4 are north of $100,000, maybe even $200,000.

I've seen figures of around a million for some stuff; and yes... I'm talking costs for manufacturing in China.

But the cost is irrelevant. The real point is, aint nobody got time for all this negativity - and I'm British!!!
 
Orvillain said:
Lot of assumptions there. I think Fractal's manufacturing costs are certainly non-zero. I can't speak to anything specific, but the sorts of figures I've seen can be staggering. It absolutely depends on the scale of the project, and it wouldn't surprise me if the total manufacturing setup costs for something like a VP4 are north of $100,000, maybe even $200,000.

I've seen figures of around a million for some stuff; and yes... I'm talking costs for manufacturing in China.

But the cost is irrelevant. The real point is, aint nobody got time for all this negativity - and I'm British!!!
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Well yeah I don’t work at fractal so of course it’s assumptions. But they’re edumacated assumptions. I make airplanes and the numbers here would chill the bones of lesser PM’s. Every cost center must be killed in the crib … which is why they cut 75% of my group in February and I have to move to Texas.

None of what I wrote was negativity. I’m just talking about build vs buy and product life cycle.
 
Patzag said:
We don't actually know the price yet.
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I was responding to a person who claimed that the price will be $650 because some website in Bangkok is announced pre-order for $800 and then extrapolating the $650 in USA.
 

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Orvillain said:
Lot of assumptions there. I think Fractal's manufacturing costs are certainly non-zero. I can't speak to anything specific, but the sorts of figures I've seen can be staggering. It absolutely depends on the scale of the project, and it wouldn't surprise me if the total manufacturing setup costs for something like a VP4 are north of $100,000, maybe even $200,000.

I've seen figures of around a million for some stuff; and yes... I'm talking costs for manufacturing in China.

But the cost is irrelevant. The real point is, aint nobody got time for all this negativity - and I'm British!!!
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Yup. People don't realize what volume manufacturing entails. You have to tool EVERYTHING. This means the tooling for the PCBs, the dies for the press brake, the dies for the metal punch, the molds for the knobs and buttons. Test fixtures for PCB testing. Functional test stations and programming stations. Etc., etc, etc.

When I first started the tooling costs were a tiny fraction of what they are now. And engineering costs have skyrocketed. We pay our engineers well and don't outsource. I feel as an American company we should be employing Americans. Maybe that's an outdated concept. I don't know, but it's how we do it.
 
FractalAudio said:
Yup. People don't realize what volume manufacturing entails. You have to tool EVERYTHING. This means the tooling for the PCBs, the dies for the press brake, the dies for the metal punch, the molds for the knobs and buttons. Test fixtures for PCB testing. Functional test stations and programming stations. Etc., etc, etc.

When I first started the tooling costs were a tiny fraction of what they are now. And engineering costs have skyrocketed. We pay our engineers well and don't outsource. I feel as an American company we should be employing Americans. Maybe that's an outdated concept. I don't know, but it's how we do it.
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Love everything about this ^^^^
I wish every company thought this way. More to the point I wish publicly traded companies thought this way - like a <250 employee sized business. Here, engineers are livestock. The leadership has zero respect for the employees. Over the last 8 months my company laid off 5% of everybody across every sector to try to mitigate the loss incurred for an acquisition they paid 11 billion for - that was worth maybe 3. Yesterday I heard credible scuttlebutt about a 3rd realignment in two years.

The aerospace defense sector sucks.
 
It's going down now. It's on like donkey kong.

I do wish Fractal would make a creative block that was like every ChaseBliss/Vongon/Meris/lofi/grainshifting/vintage/etc effects.
(I understand the Fractal modifiers).

Fractal is the best.

Thank god they made this new beast machine. And that its stereo IO.

I will purchase this the exact second my bank account has the funds to in it. I hope there will be enough VP unit supply at the outset.
 
USMC_Trev said:
The aerospace defense sector sucks.
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I write software and used to work for DoD contractors. Choosing to leave the defense industry is perhaps the greatest decision I've made in my entire life (and if not it's certainly in the top 5). If you can get out I'd highly recommend doing so. In certain fields that might be easier said than done but it did wonders for my wallet, professional prospects, and, most importantly, my well-being. Much is made about the ethics and politics of working for the military but in my case I was tired of things like

USMC_Trev said:
The leadership [having] zero respect for the employees
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To be clear: a job is always a job and there are shitty companies everywhere but the bar seems to be much higher outside of this space which is a real shame considering the disproportionate number of vets that end up there. Our country needs to do better but with the way things are going I'm not holding my breath.
 
Orvillain said:
Cliff isn't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (and possibly millions) on the tooling and manufacturing just to cheer you up. Soz.
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That may be the dumbest thing I've read on this forum. Why is there an FM9? Answer: B/c people wanted (most of) the power of an Axe FX III in a pedalboard format. Why is there an FM3? Because people didn't need all the horsepower of the other units, and they wanted something compact and portable. Why was there an FX8? Because people wanted Fractal's fx without the modeling. And so on. In short, if people don't state what they would like to see from a manufacturer, they'll never get it. Why are your panties all in a twist because I think this is a colossal disappointment?
 
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I´m wondering if a future VP4i could be integrated into a FM3/FM9/Axe III-ecosystem via digital connection, just like an additional sound module that could be seen in Axe/FM3/FM9-edit
 
gitfruit said:
I´m wondering if a future VP4i could be integrated into a FM3/FM9/Axe III-ecosystem via digital connection, just like an additional sound module that could be seen in Axe/FM3/FM9-edit
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AFAIK, the coming one will already do that to great degree via SPDIF.
 
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