Polyend Tracker Mini

Nah, I don’t pre-order anything, You’d be daft to. I just did the next worst thing.

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yeah…polyend stays minimizing customer concerns by offering up pretty thin, “not our fault tho!” reasoning

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Smells fishy. Especially from a company that has had quality issues in the past(Tracker version 1).

Honestly disappointed cause I really want to like them and the products have a lot of potential. It’s just sad to see little respect to consumers again and again.

Don’t understand how they were aware of the faulty “small batch”, yet still managed to ship them out. More likely there was no QC at all and the units were just boxed straight after assembly.

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Yeah that seems a bit weird to me. I guess it’s possible that they could have discovered a gap in the QC process after that batch went out, but I am less inclined to think this given their history of QC issues.

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You mean Push 3? Yeah, my point was that if Polyend charges 700 for a piece of hardware that has very consistently questionable build quality, that makes the 2000 price tag of the Push 3 Standalone seem reasonable. After all, that’s also a mighty fine 64-pad MPE controller, an audio interface and an incredibly competent daw, sequencer, sampler, looper, etc etc.

No doubt. Their hardware is impeccable.

As someone with real world experience shipping hardware to early backers while dealing with QC issues in a new production line, I’m pretty sure that that’s just the way they choose to downplay it when communicating about it in public. They’d be insane if they chose to say “yeah we’re dealing with a bunch of QC and we don’t yet have full control of the situation, pray for us”. :blush: I’m sure they’ll sort it out soon though.

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A reply from the Polyend team (on their forum).

To clarify right now all our orders are preorders from dealers or customers.

My reply;

If something hasn’t been released but is due in the future, I’d class that as a pre-order. But if a product is available to buy from an independent retailer/shop, it’s in stock, gets shipped and arrives in your hands the next day…that is most certainly not a ‘pre-order’.

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What I don’t understand in the context of their reply is this other reply they sent out:

“It seems the plastic case might be deformed a bit, but since it is a handheld device, it shouldn’t be a problem”

They went from “it shouldn’t be a problem” to “small batch slipped through CQ”.

The narrative doesn’t add up.

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Exactly. But don’t ya love a good mystery?

And so, would anyone care to share a few photo’s of there’s?

Except wobbly cases (e.g. my Digitakt) and sticking buttons which actually get sticky after some time? Same issue (but concerning the whole unit) with Push 2 as I’ve heard… we’ll see how P3 fares after a few years.

Nothing is perfect. Most important thing is how the company handles such issues. Will they acknowledge it, maybe even replace it, if it’s some manufacturing fault, or will they say “not our problem”?

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Yeah, I’ve had plenty of bad units over the years from major manufacturers (skippy dsi evolver encoders, monomachine + drive failure, sticky buttons on an analog rytm, broken walrus audio switch out of box, bad encoder out of box from a meris hedra, scratchy cutoff knob on a moog sub37, and plenty more). In almost all of the instances, the customer support was top notch though. It’s just a matter of continuous direct communication to get your specific issue resolved. It sounds like polyend is going to cover warranty fix/replacement for the units with the swell which is a win.

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meanwhile if you change the time line around,
“small batch slipped through CQ” (one could add a “but”, or “nonetheless” here) “it shouldn’t be a problem”
it, to me, is almost a logical complete thought with no contradictions.

well this escalated quickly, deescalated quickly, and then escalated quickly again :laughing:

I would not say Elektron gear is impeccable. They’ve had many issues over the years. Most recently for me my Syntakt arrived with the circuit board partially detached and the screws loose.

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Ouch. Yeah I can only speak from my personal experience, you’re of course right.

mine came very nicely built. but at the same time my tracker gen 1 was okay too.

nothing janky, nothing swollen on the back, buttons in place, on/off button nicely centered.

the button near the one you push moves slightly but nothing major and it is to be expected since it is probably a board underneath with all buttons lined up that you are pushing.

overall the size is nice, the case is dope and you can pretty much carry it anywhere.

that is all I expected.

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any chance you could possibly post up a few close-ups (especially how the side seams, the back and around the screen area) please.

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still no a tracker mini videos using midi external controllers on performance mode. this one on the og tracker looks interesting.

Lol, so you dont believe me ?

:speak_no_evil: :upside_down_face: :squid:

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I think he just wants to verify if others are experiencing what he unfortunately did when he got a badly built unit.

Also to be fair, your pictures do not show faults, but are also not very up close or detailed, which is exactly where the other user found the issues.

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that is where maybe you might want to take my word for it ?

but if anything I can get a professional photographer to clear out the doubts…

oh well, nevertheless I like what I bought and I will not be afraid to use it.

:boar: :space_invader: :skull_and_crossbones:

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