Pitchfork

A piece of electronic music history has been put up for auction today on eBay. With bidding starting at a cool $8,500, the primitive vocoder prototype used on Kraftwerk's revered "Autobahn" is happily prepared to fall into the hands of some crazy-rich impulse-buying studio enthusiast.

Depicted in the sleeve art for the band's earlier Ralf & Florian LP, the vocoder is, according to its seller, "basically working and partly functional," although it "definitely needs an overhaul by a knowledgable technician."

The seller also casually states, "Highest bidder may have contact to the engineers who built it." That, of course, not being Kraftwerk themselves, but rather, "electronic engineers in the area of Physikalisch-Technische BundesAnstalt (PTB) Braunschweig, Dipl.Ing P.Leunig and Dipl.Ing. K.Obermayer." Dude, doesn't Germany have some equivalent of the Smithsonian?