
Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012) - acdanger
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-18261045
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_mgr
Another secret within the Zildjian Family -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian)

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klapinat0r
Care to elaborate, what is the "secret"?

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ohashi
Sabian is run by the same family from the look of it, albeit a different
branch after a legal dispute.

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unknownzero
The comments here seem to be very focused on the "secret" alloy. What I took
away was the success of keeping Zildjian a profitable family business is
mostly due to smart processes in how to involve new members of the family. IE,
no reporting to another family member, must work outside the company first to
gain another perspective to bring back to the company, no hiring spouses. I'm
not an expert on the matter but I'd imagine that nepotism and having limited
outside insight are big problems for most multi-generational family
businesses.

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Vadoff
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but isn't it easy to just smelt the metals down, put
it through a centrifuge of some sort, and find out the alloy composition?

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Turing_Machine
It may not be just the composition (which could easily be figured out with a
mass spec or the like). How metal alloys are formed and treated can have vast
effects on their properties.

For instance,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel)

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rjsw
There are machines [1] designed for this sort of thing, my father used to
"own" a JEOL one that he used for research on all kinds of stuff from Iron Age
artifacts to gas turbine blades.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microprobe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microprobe)

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sjtrny
> Nearly 400 years ago, in 1623, Avedis Zildjian founded a cymbal-
> manufacturing company in Istanbul.

That text next to a picture of "Avedis Zildjian" confused me for a while
before I visited wikipedia. Did a time travelling photographer take that
picture? No it's just Avedis Zildjian the third.

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jsprogrammer
Yes, poor caption.

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NegativeK
I'm a little confused -- I thought identifying element proportions was a
solved problem. Perhaps it's the contents of the mixture as well as the
process?

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CaveTech
I'm sure its composition could be determined by anyone who really wanted to
know. But as a business owner you don't want to talk about that; being a one
of a kind, 400 year old secret formula is way better business.

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jsprogrammer
>But as a business owner you don't want to talk about that; being a one of a
kind, 400 year old secret formula is way better business.

Pure speculation; presented as fact.

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keypusher
As a longtime drummer, I respect Zildjian for being a market leader that still
makes a quality product. The music industry can be fickle and might quickly
transition to another brand if the quality dropped or if Zildjian just wasn't
"cool" anymore, but that never seems to have happened.

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atarian
I can't think of any tech company, other than Google that has a "secret sauce"
(like a search engine algorithm) that they can hand down generation after
generation.

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ArkyBeagle
MapReduce is largely described in books and papers from the 1950s.

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mcculley
There's a lot more to a search engine than MapReduce.

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hayksaakian
Spoiler: they don't reveal the details of the alloy mix

