Just to clarify this, the current system can be put together without any assembly, everything is pretty much plug n play by now (windows, mac & linux). You can of course customize things as much as you like. As for the data quality, measuring quality for this type of system is not at all hard. It is well known what the data is supposed to look like, and if it doesn't, its usually pretty obvious. It's a bit like a microphone and a sound card, all you need is to play a known signal and then compare the result to see if there was any degradation. Pretty much any lab using the system has testing equipment for this. There is a pretty long list of labs that are currently using the system and are getting very good results. These are all labs that have a lot of experience with this kind of recording and in most cases are recording the same data with commercial systems and can compare the data. We're currently going through a bunch of in-depth measurements and will publish the results as soon as time allows. Here's a quick side-by-side for now: http://open-ephys.org/blog/201... Finally, the Intan chips that we're using are already being used by a bunch of commercial vendors, which speaks to their quality and is a great opportunity for making equipment more inter-operable in the future.

The main difference is that the open ephys system is designed for recording neurons, not just scalp potentials and scales to very high channel numbers >128 channels at rates of 30kHz, which is fast enough to do extracellular electrophysiology. That being said, a few labs are starting to use open ephys for EEG ( https://open-ephys.atlassian.n... ).