Add one to the "long string of purchases for projects", "
supposed" Matsushita BBD IC's. They come in pairs, one MN3207 which is the actual capacitor array, and one MN3102 which is the clock chip. Since they were less than 1USD per chip shipped from the Middle Kingdom, the idea that they might be real is bordering on silly.
Matsushita stopped making the originals in 1999, and since chips of that family are used in modulation stomp boxes "as made famous by men who made
goodpopular music and then killed themselves" the actual stock of the parts must have dwindled
fast. There are as-such marked clones, and I've paid my dues to the "respectable clone" trade, by buying some of those, branded "Beiling Shanghai". Beiling and Coolaudio are the two current cloners, the latter being a vertical integration in music industry giant Behringer (the company that today owns the British crown jewels Midas, Klark-Teknik and Turbosound.
)
These chips are much more of a gamble, just to find out if there is any meat to the argument that some clones are better than other clones.
On the positive side I notice that the transport company, "Orange Connex" which sounds like a cross between a phone company and a railway mismanager apparently can sneak the little white plastic padded bags past the Postnord protection racket and that I thus avoid extra VAT and a SEK75 handling fee. Or this might be an effect of Ebay VAT rule complicance.
Now I just need to fail to find the rest of the components in my bins and drawers, order them anew from Mouser, only to find that I already had 52% of them while trying to sort the new purchases into my "system".