There was nothing like "you'll regret buying these things because they're fraught with problems".
It's safe to say that samples from any company will never have problems. It is safe to assume that any defective units would have been weeded out of any batch produced for demo purposes. Therefore, unless he had a run of them built, he probably never saw these problems.
Unfortunately, it is quickly becoming clear that the supposed delays to test every unit were complete B.S. The delays were probably because the company was busy building products for bigger clients. Then, when they got a few free cycles, they set up a line, then cranked our pres out. Because they were so late, they didn't have time for any real testing much more extensive than "plug it in and make sure it doesn't smoke", so they just tossed them into a boat and hoped for the best. Heck, some of them had wires unplugged. If those passed QA testing, my name is Elmo. That shouldn't even have passed the physical inspection stage
before case assembly...
before QA testing.
The failure rate we're seeing here is pretty much unprecedented. These units have a higher failure rate than I'd expect from a first round prototype production....
In any final production run at a legitimate manufacturer, 100% of units are tested, and a burn-in test failure rate of 1% in a test cycle would shut down the line. A customer failure rate of 5% would get the line shut down permanently (likely along with the manufacturer in question). Thus, a customer DOA failure rate of what appears to be on the order of 100% for an entire run (I have yet to hear reports of any completely non-humming 81s or 73s) is absolutely unheard of---absolutely unprecedented. That goes beyond criminally negligent, all the way to completely and utterly incompetent.
Based on the failure rates I'm seeing here, I can't believe ANYBODY deals with this manufacturer for anything. I wouldn't hire them to wipe my a**, much less manufacture products for me in the future.
Don't get me wrong, I don't blame Chance for any of this. We knew it could be a crapshoot. I never in my wildest dreams would have expected the level of negligence I've seen on the manufacturer's part, though. Chance, I think you should inform the manufacturer that short of them doing an entire new TESTED production run (including shipping) of the 81s and 73s for us, future rackmount hardware will be manufactured by someone else. And stick to it. You deserve better than this s**t. We all do.
If you want a good manufacturing plant (at least for building pres), get in touch with Quanta over in Taiwan. I'm pretty sure you'll get better results (assuming they'll do runs this small). They are, at least judging from their website, moving into the space of being a full-service engineering support house (doing board layout, etc.). At the very least, they'd never ship you hundreds of units without doing the slightest bit of testing....
)
but my warranty claims rate is about one-tenth of that . . .