T
timthetortoise
MADE OF SANDALWOOD
Not necessarily guitar related, but close enough.
A buddy of mine has been wanting to get into recording with his own equipment for awhile, so he decided to buy a couple of interfaces. I helped him do some research and he decided on a couple of MOTU 8pres (I hadn't read a single bad thing about them. And hell, it's MOTU. From what I've seen/used, their stuff is rock solid). So, we went to GC and it turned out they'd have to ship them from another store. No big deal. When they arrived at his house, he noticed that the box was very poorly packed. Padding only on the bottom. He also noticed that the packaging on both of the boxes had been opened, and that one of them had actually been used (manual package was opened along with the sticker over the firewire ports taken off). Definitely not a good sign. I told him to bring them back immediately, but he still wanted to give them a try. We tested them out for awhile and couldn't get past an issue of them constantly resyncing, giving dropouts/pops and crackles (he's using a pretty hefty system, dropouts at 44.1khz with 512 samples per buffer shouldn't even be close to happening). So this weekend we brought them back and explained the situation, asking what the alternatives were. Decided to not go with another pair of MOTUs, but thought that the Firestudio would be out of range. Well, the manager of the department comes into the picture. At first I thought he was going to be shitty about it, because that's standard GC attitude ("you did something wrong. Here, try this thing that will not make a difference with your setup and see if it changes anything"), but he actually called another store and had the manager there ship out - confirmed in factory packaging - a Firestudio, and a Digimax FS.
Yep, $300+ difference done as an even trade. I couldn't believe it. He lucked out big time. I felt bad at first for swaying him to the MOTUs, but after this he couldn't have made a better choice. Just sharing my unusual GC story that doesn't end in someone getting A) bad gear or B) a bad deal.
A buddy of mine has been wanting to get into recording with his own equipment for awhile, so he decided to buy a couple of interfaces. I helped him do some research and he decided on a couple of MOTU 8pres (I hadn't read a single bad thing about them. And hell, it's MOTU. From what I've seen/used, their stuff is rock solid). So, we went to GC and it turned out they'd have to ship them from another store. No big deal. When they arrived at his house, he noticed that the box was very poorly packed. Padding only on the bottom. He also noticed that the packaging on both of the boxes had been opened, and that one of them had actually been used (manual package was opened along with the sticker over the firewire ports taken off). Definitely not a good sign. I told him to bring them back immediately, but he still wanted to give them a try. We tested them out for awhile and couldn't get past an issue of them constantly resyncing, giving dropouts/pops and crackles (he's using a pretty hefty system, dropouts at 44.1khz with 512 samples per buffer shouldn't even be close to happening). So this weekend we brought them back and explained the situation, asking what the alternatives were. Decided to not go with another pair of MOTUs, but thought that the Firestudio would be out of range. Well, the manager of the department comes into the picture. At first I thought he was going to be shitty about it, because that's standard GC attitude ("you did something wrong. Here, try this thing that will not make a difference with your setup and see if it changes anything"), but he actually called another store and had the manager there ship out - confirmed in factory packaging - a Firestudio, and a Digimax FS.
Yep, $300+ difference done as an even trade. I couldn't believe it. He lucked out big time. I felt bad at first for swaying him to the MOTUs, but after this he couldn't have made a better choice. Just sharing my unusual GC story that doesn't end in someone getting A) bad gear or B) a bad deal.
