Hi there! First post here, I've been in fx diy for years now, always enjoying in many ways everything the online diy community has to offer, from Tonepad/GGG/Geofex/AMZ kind of sites to the amazing forums like this one. Sadly I'm not able to add anything by now (still lots to learn here), but hope to help someway in the future.
The one thing that really pisses me off is when someone makes (BIG) profit over someone else's work, I believe this is one of those cases. Lots of guys work very hard to provide us lots of knowledge and info, so we can have a great deal of fun (and knowledge!), and those same guys get ripped off by a few jerks out there...
Couldn't this guy just make his own pcb and avoid using someone else's copyrighted artwork? Maybe to make a better layout to suit his needs, or to add a little bit here and there... I believe anyone that has ever done a project from the web ended up changing or adding something to suit his own personal needs.
That leads me to believe this MG guy just don't know a d*mn thing about what he is doing (and selling for LOTS of money, BTW). And that's pretty disturbing for me, also a pedal buyer, that I can pay BIG money for some nice looking, full of BS promises pedal and end up with a DIY project I've already done and tweaked myself to my tastes (maybe I've even designed my own board to place some tweaks, he hasn't EVEN done that!)
Gotta carry my screwdriver with me now all the time, especially when shopping for pedals...
Surely wouldn't buy any that carried those oil caps inside.
Ed G. wrote:I can only assume that MG is buying the pcbs from JD. So no harm, no foul. I would think he would delete the identifying tags from the pcb if he were etching his own from the boards.
I must agree, if JD sells MG his boards and knows they go inside those pedals, we shouldn't care about that. But I'd like to ask JD on this (you guys who know and talk to him could do that for us).
Anyway, it sounds pretty odd to import finished pcbs from USA to Brazil. Ok, you could, but sounds odd. Labor costs are probably a lot lower anywhere in South America, right?
Even so, should a guy who can't design his own pcbs sell pedals from $229 to "$379 and up"?
Anyway, before this thread I didn't even know MG Pedals existed. Now I've done some research and found a clip on YouTube, it's from his Denmark dealer, so I assume it's "MG-approved". I think his Fuzzyland sounds pretty lame, which makes me even more concerned that this guy may be just "surfing the hype wave", if you know what I mean...
[Look for MG Fuzzyland on YouTube, I can't post any links yet]
According to the site, he even makes guitar amps... Strange... At least he can wire them PTP, so he doesn't need a board there...
I'll wait for the gutshots, still can't believe the guys uses GGG/Tonepad pcbs and even leave the names in there! Sounds too stupid to be true... Snail, have you got any gutshots of that booster?