What? Bonnie has a sister? Well hellooo, nurse (laughing), but I see she doesn't wear TI flats? Not my type of girl.
Brother Ray: I'd bet one US greenback that one of your reasons for selling the Anni SR is that while it was beautiful and well-crafted, its sound didn't live up to your expectations. No?
And reaching waaaay back (I've ignored this thread for a while, can you tell?), when I was shopping for My New Bass earlier this year I really, really tried to go for the Sadowsky thing, mostly because they're the hip thing for a lot of people right now. They sound wonderful, especially in a mix. They play well and feel fantastic. Most of them, except the occasional Seafoam Green monstrosity, are beautiful.
But the thing that turned me off them--zero offense intended, alemboid and everyone else--is that every piece is made somewhere else and meshed into their final form by the Sadowsky crew.
Alex Aguilar laid the circuit for that wonderful preamp before he went into the amp business under his own name. The bodies get their rough carve from another subcontractor, and Roger refuses to say who tho he denies it's Warmoth. The paint is done by yet another person.
What I respect about Alembic is that nearly every component is crafted by hand under one of their roofs. The bodies are glued and shaped and finished in one place, by hand. The pickups and electronics are made by the same person who designed them, and who, through constant close observation of these circuits, has learned to see their shortcomings and improved them. You can't buy that anymore.
And the company has never changed hands.
All of these things are very important to me, especially in this age where most consumer products appear to be designed and built to last a few months or years and then break, so the company, whoever owns it, extracts money from you again and again for the priviliege of owning their failure-prone device, be it a Compaq computer, a Konka TV or a Ford sedan, all of which I'm less than pleased to own.
While Alembics cost more than just about all of their competitors, what you receive will be done right and the craftsmen and -women who built it don't blow you off after they get your money.
Again, bravo.
