external synthrecommendation?

[John Heim]

I bought an external doubletalk a year ago in April. So it's only a year and 
a half old and it appears to hav died. I first started having trouble with 
it when it was still less than a year old. I kind of wish I had sent it back 
when it first started acting up.

I have 2 questions:
1. Is my experience with the doubletalk LT typical? How long do they usually 
last? For $350, I'd expect to get more than a year and a half out of it.

2. Any recommendations for an external synth? Obviously, I want to spend as 
little as possible but I'll spend whatever I have to to get a good synth.
PS: The symptoms are as follows: I turn the doubletalk on, it says 
"doubletalk ready". But it does not speak when used with a machine running 
speakup. I have a tripletalk external synth at workso I know  speakup is 
working.

When I initialize the doubletalk, I often get kernel error messages. But I 
don't think that's particularly meaningful. Probably the ltlk driver just 
doesn't know how to handle it whenit detects a synth but the synth doesn't 
respond properly.