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Was it really that unreliable and overly complex? Bob Moog himself described Dave Luce as a "highly
intelligent, technically trained person who gravitated toward
complicated, sophisticated, tricky, convoluted things"
and "...who liked complicated solutions to seemingly
simple problems". Reading into Moog's statement, it could
be construed that perhaps Luce was indeed a boffin who may
well have taken the longest route to get there.
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Certainly, the Polymoog was complicated and a challenge to service.
Even today it is very difficult to find a technician who is
prepared to take one on! It should be borne in mind that back
in 1975, there wasn't any large scale use of IC's (integrated
circuits) or DSP (digital signal processors). In Luce's defence,
Norlin did step up the pressure on him to release the machine
before he considered it to be finished, leaving the company
attempting to rush to close the gate after the horse had bolted
but… yes, it was certainly overly complex. The reliability
issues, whilst they cannot be denied, do seem to have been
exaggerated. What didn't help was the fact that the earliest
models to leave the production line, (the ones the press and
the rock elite focussed on) were breaking down and with good
reason. Some were being returned from shops as non-working
before the customers turned up to collect them. Most of these
problems were corrected and revisions were issued by the factory
to address them. By then however, irrevocable damage had already
been done to the Polymoog's reputation.
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