On the 2nd November 2025 a guy in Germany bought two PCB's from us on ebay. They were shipped on the 3rd Nov, and just arrived today on the 14th April 2026, setting a new record for 163 days in the post! Slightly excessive by anyones standards. 🤔

Nothing beats the Yamaha SPX90 when it comes to that horrible sinking feeling when you pull the lid off and take a look at the power supply! I'm fairly sure this has actually been on fire at some point!

Todays entry for the packaging disasters album. A now dead Casio SK1 shipped all the way here from Greece... I can't help thinking it might have been an idea to actually inflate some of those balloons. 🤔

Just put the phrase "General printer error! - parts in your printer are nearing the end of their life, please consult a service engineer" through Google translate, and it came out as "Hi it's Epson here, we have detected that you haven't paid us any money recently, please rectify the situation asap"

I've always said that ambient needs to be a lot more exciting.

2nd hand kit rule #735: Obviously a really awful guitar made out of fence posts and Bakelite 50 years ago must be at least £300 better than a really awful guitar made last week. If it isn't then the price of vintage music gear makes no sense, and that can't be right. 🤔

From over 2 decades of troubleshooting peoples mod installs and kit builds i can categorically state that its ALWAYS people who don't take the time to thoroughly read the build guide and have an inexplicable over confidence and belief in their own abilities, that fuck things up the worst.

well thats... odd. Apparently everyones favorite component shop Tayda electronics in Thailand stock 42 items made by 'Multicomp Pro', which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that Multicomp Pro is an in house brand created and owned by Farnell UK, and Tayda definitely aren't a distributor...

Every time you post anything on a Facebook business page they really push you to add a whatsapp or other messaging link to "make it easier for customers to contact you" Christ on a bike! Thats the last thing we want! Have you ever met 'customers'? They're awful people. 😉

Sorry i've been away from the internet for a few hours. Are we all now mocking a narcissist who has nuclear weapons, because he was too spineless to destroy the world? I mean, it sounds kind of like a high risk strategy, but if thats what all the cool people are doing then obviously i'm on board!

It pleases me immensely that that theres a company called Rauland-Borg that makes audio and communication gear, amongst other things. Its like the name of a really bad Roland / Korg cover band thats definitely not infringing on any trademarks.

You seem like exactly the kind of people who would want a modified ALTO Alphaverb II / Alesis Nanoverb 2...

"...it is a universal truth that those least able to master the art of packaging, are simultaneously cursed with a wildly misplaced confidence in the absolute worst couriers" - Socrates 413 BC

I have it on good authority that Jesus would absolutely love it if you bought this glow in the dark Hate Echo pedal. Don't ask me how i know. Lets just say i know people... circuitbenders.etsy.com/listing/1173...

Theres a certain sense of dread known only to someone who has just unscrewed a screw from an outer casing only to find that its a few mm longer and with a different thread to all the other screws, and it very clearly should be somewhere else inside...

I'm sure it's entirely possible to live a full and fulfilling life without owning one of these top quality circuitbenders t-shirts, but what is Jesus going to think when he rather predictably turns up for some zombie action on Sunday? Do you want to make him sad?

Excited to discover that we have 143 followers on instagram, despite having never posted anything there and only realising that we actually had an account a couple months back... If you enjoy absolute indifference, why not follow us there as well?

Obviously we appreciate relentlessly receiving a torrent of 50 email updates for every single Aliexpress order as much as anyone else, but now they've started daily update emails to tell us that orders we haven't made haven't been shipped!

I don't think its over reacting to suggest that if you're the kind of person who opens something up and either loses all the screws, or puts them all back in the wrong places as if it doesn't matter, then I would be compelled to hope you die in some kind of freak laundry based incident.

Today marks the 5th anniversary of the greatest bit of what i'm really hoping was autocorrect, that we've ever been sent! erm... you build what now?

If we accept for the sake of argument that the Yamaha DD6 is actually a drum machine, then most people who claim that their first drum machine was an 808 or a 909 suddenly aren't looking so cool anymore. Everyone has owned one, but nobody knows what happened to it. Where did they all go? 🤔

Dare you witness the sheer mind shattering terror of the Paia 4740 Envelope Generator module!

Just watching The Capture on BBC iPlayer, and i don't know about you, but when i'm in the hidden headquarters of a high-tech black ops organisation its always reassuring to see that they have a random Behringer Feedback Destroyer just lying around on a desk. 🤔

Why not stop and take a few moments of your time to look at this photograph? Many thanks for your understanding in this matter.

Lets all just take a brief moment to enjoy imagining the sense of despair that must have weighed heavy on the personnel of Ridge Runner electronics in Texas, on the day these PCB's arrived in 1994.

I have gone forth and engaged in combat with the office network, and have emerged victorious! All devices are functioning optimally... I AM NOW THE I.T. KING!

Weird how if for some baffling reason audiophiles hand build an opamp out of discrete parts it apparently always sounds superb, but if the Chinese do EXACTLY the same thing for 1/10th of the price with a machine, it sounds like junk. Almost as if what they hear is changed by a perception of value.🤔

This is the way...

is there an app where i can just badly mumble a riff into it and it'll search all recorded music history to tell me if i'm a musical genius whos just come up with an absolute belter, or i've stolen it from something i heard in passing at a party 2 decades ago, but its so good its stuck with me?

Young people. Emails are not an ancient form of messaging or online chat. If we've spent some time composing a detailed email discussing various points and asking several questions, then a chatty one sentence response that addresses none of them is not useful.

Sometimes you get an email from someone thats so strange that you are compelled to look them up on social media, and they really don't disappoint! Where to even begin with this astonishing work of graphic design genius...?

Sometimes while browsing ebay i become infuriated by the ridiculous display of capitalist greed in some of the pricing and have an urge to post a link to the worst offenders on social media so we can all enjoy being disgusted... and then once again i realise thats exactly what they want me to do.

This cat remains unimpressed, but on this occasion he's entirely incorrect as like all Frontline rackmounts the X4 is both hilariously awful and absolutely great at the same time. Its like they'd heard about audio quality, and just decided it really wasn't for them.

There are a grand total of 18 easily available components in a Roland CR78 kickdrum, probably costing under £1 in total. Surely it'd be a lot cheaper to just build the CR78 sounds you like, rather than spending £2000 on buying one. At that price the guiro you'll never use is costing you about £150!

Further adventures in Aliexpress listings #748: "whenever the temperature is too high or the humidity is too low, AI intelligence" Thats what i always say and i'll happily fight anyone who says otherwise...

Phonic Verbifex FX unit from a few years back -mods include a reclocking knob and a light up RAM looping push button. This is one of my favourite modded FX racks, which is why we still own it. We've never seen another one. It somehow has a weird lofi hauntological quality to the odd loops it creates

The resistor of the beast...

Really depressingly having to learn about routers, and theres lots of talk of buying better than you need for 'future proofing'. What the hell are they on about? Theres no point spending more and planning ahead as your £200 router will have just overheated and died within 2-3 years, like they all do

Jomox xbase09 with a full set of blue replacement LED switches and red ones on the beat for easier programming. Lets face it, it does 909 sounds, its all going to be 4/4. We won't be needing any of that wacky Jazz time signature bullshit here! 😉

Electronics mystery no.472: All Eastern Bloc synths, drum machines and FX seem to use purely slotted head screws. Hadn't the Philips head screw been invented in the soviet union, or was it an anti-communist type of screw used purely by decadent westerners?

Korg M3R with a 24 way audio destruction patchbay mounted in the top of the case. Yes, we know thats going to make it difficult to mount in a rack, but the rack ears were missing so the owner decided to go for a unit that would just it on top of their rack case.

Kudos to STR. They really know how to torment the "well, actually..." reply guys! 😉

Its St Patricks Day so imagine we've made some kind of cheap graphic that stereotypes the Irish. Probably involving Guinness, leprechauns and walking around with a pig under your arm, Inevitably you now have an uncontrollable urge to give us money. Don't try and fight it. Its the right thing to do*

There are two types of audio electronics companies in the world. The ones who will just tell you that the reason that your drum machine won't play is because you've got the sync set to external midi clock, and the ones who will charge you £100 to 'repair' the problem.

Must have spent 5 hours trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on with the knobs and faders on a digital recorder all controlling each other in groups of 8. Checking more and more unlikely and esoteric possibilities...... and then you finally see this. Someone overtightened a screw...

ebay listings that start "This is my XXXX up for auction, heres what AI says about it...." I couldn't give two shits what AI says about it. Its YOUR thing, tell me about it yourself, and tell me why i should own it, preferably in a way that doesn't sound like its spewed out of a LinkedIn user.

Come on, theres got to be some top quality pun about guitar people and being anal about valves available here...

Circuit bent Yamaha PSS270 with 8 FM dataline cut switches to scramble the preset data sent to the FM synth chip every time you load a preset sound. Try getting absolutely incoherent sounds like this in any other way!

DOD512 effects rack with 8 x RAM glitching switches, a RAM data loop switch, a system reclocking knob and an extreme low range reclocking switch. This is one of very few effects units where the parameter controls still have a usable effect when the RAM contents are forcibly looped.

Hi, Paypal here. Someone opened a dispute on a transaction which we need you sort out as a matter of urgency, but hilariously we're going to offer you a login window of about 30 seconds to do it in before repeatedly automatically logging you out due to 'security'. Its a race against time! Good luck!