A tale of two eBay auctions: #7335975478: 'World's most modded TR606 drum machine!', ended July 10th 2005, 246 views, sold to twistedaudio for £350. #7354365370: 'World's Most Modified Roland TR-606', ended October 6th 2005, 8811 views, mentioned by numerous blogs and message boards, sold by twistedaudio for £853.
Hmmm. I wish I'd spotted this at the time.
UPDATE: #7356203863: Either these things are being mass-produced, or a joker in Coopersberg PA is trying to sell the same unit. Bidding starts at $240. (thanks, FierceFish)
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
Also look at the bid history, looks like the seller did a bit of shill bidding to get his price. I feel sorry for the guy that bought it "the worlds most expensive tr-606" The analog solutions mod is VERY disappointing since you can't actually make the 606 sound any better, any knob tweak just makes the standard 606 sounds (which are great BTW) worse. There are much better 606 mods out there which actullay improve the sound.
Also that thing is so big for what it does, from the cheap case to the AS mods that thing was WAY too expensive, you could buy a 909 or 808 for that money and still have change for modding etc.
Whatever you do to the 606, it's still going to be a 606, and it's still going to sound like a golf ball in a bucket of meccano. I use 606 samples and tweak them about to make them sound a bit more interesting but with this baby you still need the outboard to do that. Maybe the buyers are getting confused with a 303...