TBCs going end of life, no more new AVToolbox!
 

Not sure if this is old news but I’ve found and confirmed that a number of common recommended TBCs have already or will be going end of life very soon. AV Toolbox’s website has the following notice posted on the product page:
EOL NOTICE
The AVT-8710 has been scheduled for End of Life. This product will remain on our price list, and will continue to be available until July 2018. If you need a AVT-8710 for your project, please contact your sales representative.

http://www.tvone.com/avt-8710-time-base-corrector

I inquired to confirm and the reps confirmed that this product and the 1T-TBC and 1T-TBC-GL are also going EOL. The reason according to them is that one of the main components within these units is being discontinued by their supplier.

While I doubt there’s currently any shortage of these products, it’s clear they won’t be produced much longer.

Thanks for the notice. :)

But the AVT-8710 is fubar, and has been for years. The now-EOL black units have had catastrophic issues for going on 7-8 years now, and it has never been fixed. After what I'd guess are many complaints, their "fix" is to just stop making it. This is sad ... but not really. Many of us considered that Cypress (AVT just rebadges/imports) was discontinued years ago, with the green boxes.

DataVideo has been discontinued for years now.

It was going to happen eventually. It's a main reason I stockpiled so many TBCs, for fear of not having supply chain to required gear back in my studio days.

Hmm, makes me wonder if the issues of the units are somehow connected to this component supply problem. If the component in question was only available from one source and that source wasn’t very reliable, maybe they had no choice but to use it. But if now even that supplier no longer is Making it, then it pretty much seals the deal.

A couple of years ago, some of us tried to make a spreadsheet to catalog the chips between good and bad units. But we weren't making any headway to pinpoint exactly what chip it was. Lack of time, lower priority, kept me from revisiting that topic/project. I still have slight urge to discover which was guilty, but it's obviously moot now. It'll never be fixed. Those black units are just forever going to be crap.

It would have been interesting if it were to turn out that the black ones can be modded to get rid of the ghosting, but that might be a long shot.

A shame about the TBC's going away. Thankfully I have two units, the DPS-575 and the Feral unit that both still works well with no issues. Having several broadcast level decks with built in TBC's I should be in good shape for quite awhile. Sadly now getting a reliable TBC is getting harder and harder now. Though digital has pretty much taken over, it still has alot of shortcomings like data corruption and bit rot, and having to make multiple backups to different sites. Still makes analog somewhat still viable.