few musicians realize there is a price of admission to owning vintage synths.
That’s a great way to put it!
So want a used Ferrari? Cool.
Want to pay $9,000 for a new clutch?
Mmmm… 
Thanks for the kind words GD, especially since my post was so rambling.
I’m not a very good writer.
Kevin just did a full refurb on my IIP. He is THE MAN! Highly recommended.
Yes indeed, Kevin is a great meticulous tech. But you might be one of his last lucky customer to benefit from his huge knowledge and experience, after reading his worrisome, and very true, reflections on the state of the synth repair business, only exacerbated by his slowly failing health very unfortunately, earlier on this thread.
Thanks and you’re likely right.
But nothing lasts forever and others will come along and try their best.
One day Voyagers will be vintage and newbies will learn of something called a Model D that actually came before it.
Then the same arguments will be said “I’d love a Model D, but only make $300K a year. How could I afford one?”
I believe that’s what’s known as the Wacky Racers school of synthesizer repair.
It’s a drag, but I recently reached the same conclusion (for myself) as what Kevin is suggesting about vintage synth ownership. I had a Model D that I bought for $250 in the late 80s. It’s still with a friend of mine, and he’s willing to sell it to me for $400 (long story involving friends of friends and the way we approach gear sales/trades among ourselves). But after a lot of soul searching I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to get into. It’s true that nothing sounds like that synth, but then again I like the sound of the Little Phatty just as much, and it does everything I used to do with the Model D plus a lot more, along with all the new-synth advantages. The thing that makes the story relevant to this thread is that it’s definitely the cost and diminishing supply of really good vintage synth tech services that tipped the balance towards no-go, as much as I wanted to be able to justify buying it back.
P.S. He wouldn’t sell it to anyone else for that price, or even to me unless I was intending to hold on to it or to sell it for the current market rate and split the difference, so please don’t ask 
Kevin (and Monica!) are great folks and do excellent work. I’m in OC (Irvine) and do some synth repair for fun and to help out folks. Since they’re my favorite, I pretty much just work on Yamaha CS-80s including tuning, repairs, and installing Kenton MIDI kits. I’ve also done the occasional Oberheim FVS, Polymoog, and other late-70s analog polysynths. I’ve probably fixed up 7 or 8 CS80s and a couple of FVSs in the last 5 years.
I’ve got a CS80 arriving from the east coast soon for a major maintenance update and MIDI install that will take most of my free time (from my day job - designing digital chips…) for about 3 months. However, I try to help out folks who have simple problems or just tuning/calibration, especially for synths that Kevin doesn’t want to deal with.
I wish I could do this for a living, but designing computer chips pays a hell of a lot more!
Also, my wife isn’t going to let me do this to the dining room again (I think it looks great):
David
ps - my website ( http://therogoffs.com/cs80/ ) has lots of collected Yamaha service manuals and photos of repairs
pps - I also run the Yahoo CS80 group (http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/yamahacs80/) that’s been going strong for almost 9 years now!
I’ve heard David does good work on his CS80 repairs.
He has helped me (and thus helped others) in ways I cannot say.
But a CS80 weighs 220lbs (about 100kg) and I fear he may get hurt one day too.
It’s a real drag because the CS80 is very complicated inside, made with custom chips and filled with poor quality adjustments (and LOTS of them!)
By the time you get to be any sort of expert, you’re likely too old to move one.
This is why I think it’s important to share knowledge and experience.
I also think a properly tuned and operating CS80 is just an amazing instrument.
One thing the CS80 does have going for it inside reliability-wise is that despite it having hundreds of wires everywhere, there is only one connector (to the power supply.)
That hugely increases the reliability especially for something that might be dropped when moving or shipping, but makes repairs more difficult.
As far as vintage instruments that use custom chips, I really hope that in the future many of the CEM, SSM, Yamaha, Moog, Korg and Roland custom chips are copied and made available again.
This is already being done with the main VCF/VCA chips in the Juno 106, but it would be wonderful if the CEM line was remade, for example.
There would be sooo many new analog synths made.
I would also love to see a Polymoog where the sustain pedal works like a real piano.
Moog (old Moog) goofed on their custom “$100,000 chip” and it meant that if you played the same note twice when velocity was turned up and the sustain pedal down, the 2nd and further notes played would sound much louder.
No one could play it with standard piano technique and instead had to play the piano preset like it was a Hohner pianet, an instrument with no sustain pedal.
I once owned a brand new full Polymoog synthesizer and I was dismayed that an instrument that did so many wonderful other sounds, couldn’t play like a normal piano when it came to using the sustain pedal.
Tony Bank of Genesis and other top keyboardists have made similar statements and that didn’t help Polymoog sales either, but it’s truth: the Polymoog has a huge “bug” in their custom chips.
I can only imagine the frustration people at Moog must have endured knowing they couldn’t afford to fix it.
As this link is one of the first hits for “Moog repair”, I thought I’d add to it as an update.
Kevin died in July, 2014. Thankfully, he left behind lots of knowledge on this forum and elsewhere on the web.
He is missed, but he is not suffering the agony he endured for 6+ years as a result of the way health care was before the ACA kicked in.