Audio Precision ATS-1 on the bay good deal

mondialfan said:
It certainly looks like you got a steal of a deal. Which is always a good thing where the big auction site is concerned. That P1P looks extremely clean too. I have a feeling a lot of these AP testers spent their lives as shelf queens seeing little use.
Click to expand...


Really, if ya got a one owner, that means they bought it new and at 18 a pop it was probably well taken care of. I can't imaGINE A HACK DROPPIN THAT MUCH ON A TEST UNIT...
 
I'd venture a guess that a ATS-1 - last of the crop - was sold somewhere between 12 & 16K without the DD upgrade, without the IMD board. The dude I talked to over at AP said they have refurb'd but good as new ATS-1s for 12K+. (not sure if those are the Access type or not... didn't ask cuz I wasn't aware of the distinction at the time...but it seems fair to assume that since A's were built from '98 to 2016, they are probably of that class).
 
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ATS-1A is branded the 'Access' line, with that "A" for access. Full on GPIB certified over IEEE-4888. The ATS-A1 went live in 1998 and lived all the way to 2016... if you can believe that. And yeah, ATS-1A was all she wrote for the "1" series. But a 16 year run ain't small peanuts.
 
Here Lee ... the "1" series breakdown:

ATS-1: Discontinued 1998 (2-channel general purpose audio analyzer) [conditional factory support]

ATS-1A: Discontinued 2016 (ATS-1 Access Audio Test System with IEEE-488 GPIB interface)

ATS-1DD: Discontinued 2016 (ATS-1 Dual-Domain Audio Test System with IEEE-488 GPIB interface; 48 kHz digital audio)
 
Some paperwork I got with mine...

Nagra owned this one..
 

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Suppose this was built in March of 2000 and not sold till 2008???
 
That invoice doesn't tell a lot but your S/N is damn high. Could have been a demo unit that finally got repurposed for final sale, an acquisition from a previous owner and again - re-certified and sold to Nagra. Or they simply over built inventory and there is sat for 8 years. Back then it was common practice for big firms to lease capital equipment like testers, analysers and scopes. Could have been that too, where Nagra leased the thing for a eight years and some corporate bean-counter went "WTF", buy the damn thing ! We went through similar equipment change-overs at the company I worked for in Silicon Valley where ROI wasn't obvious at the beginning of using a piece of equipment.


Hard to tell.

But I'll tell you this ... Nagra took care of that thing. No doubt about that !
 
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I guess I'll call Kandel in the morning....I'm curious now...
 
Looks like Kandel is out-of-biz. But the 'Wayback machine' shows them as a Used test Equipment company. My guess is that there was a previous owner OR Kandel was leasing that rig out themselves prior to Nagra scooping it up.
 
Wonder if AP would come off with who the original owner was?
 
I bet they have records like that ... and it's not like they would be devulging info of any material value or privacy concern. Give it a shot. Everyone I've talked to over there seem pretty cool & relaxed ... Oregon style. (It's probably the hootch...)
 
The correspondence I've had with em is the same, laid back ...cool...
 
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