Funny I tired to search for it but couldn't find it either so I will re tell it here. I do must apologize if I jump around in story or whatever.
Starting in mid Dec of last year a good client of mine who owns two studios, one for his private audio debauchery and one he rents out to people took a rental booking. The rental one comes with sleeping accommodations.The rental studio was rented on lock out for 6 months by some hip-hop producers. Anyway I was brought in ahead of time to make sure the studio was in order, Which it was. All speakers check o.k., pro tools was working great, console was up to snuff minus 1 mic input that has a faulty patchbay connection. The connection is tucked under large audio snakes in such a way it's so hard to get to, we just skip over it. Plus since the session was hip-hop clients who been there before we knew they would only need one mic. The studio is managed for the owner by another person. Anyway the normal procedure is the studio manager calls me out tech repairs. So clients move in and less then 24 hours later, I get a phone call from the studio manager saying the mains are not sounding right can I go check it out. This isn't even a full day in and I am already going out there. Well sure enough I get there and there was some blown tweeters on the mains. Less then the first day and already blown tweeters. So I explained how we need to order parts, where we will get them from and that nothing can be done as we used the last of the spares to get the studio ready for them. I'm met with o.k. cool and off we go. Tweeters come in a couple days later from a placed order and the day I go to install them, I am met with the NS10's don't sound right. Again it's blown components, this time blown woofers. Lucky for them I have an associate who has lots of ns10 spare parts and is local. anyway place an order for those, install the tweeters on the mains and off I go. So already 3 days into them being there and I have already replaced 4 tweeters as the main speakers use 2 tweeters per side and NS 10 woofers are on ready to be replaced. The tweeters on the mains are around 150.00 with tax and replacement diaphragms are around 120 with tax. Not including what they paying me to go trouble shoot etc. So again I am making a third trip to the same studio to fix ns10's now. At this point without me knowing the studio manager gives my number to the clients as he is getting annoyed with them constantly calling him for things. He tells them to call me directly for any studio problems. The following day I get a phone call from their engineer saying we need a sony c800G and that the mains yet again do not not sounding right. So at first I tried to explain how they(the clients) didn't want an assistant at the studio that they could handle getting the mic, any gear rentals would be up to the assistant to do but since there is no assistant then he has to order the mic from the gear rental places. I can come and check the mains again. I go out again and check the mains and they sound as they should so I am not sure what he is talking about we listen and it sounds fine but he swears that it was not sounding fine earlier so I split. Mic arrives from the rental place and I get a phone call asking how to set it up? I called the studio manager and had him go down there to set the mic up as I was busy and better to have him do it as he is on salary vs my hourly rate which is way more $$. So the mic gets set and he(the studio manager) situates the engineer. Again I get called to come out as they are having issues this time with the mic and that the headphones are all distorted. Turns out the engineer is a fresh out of audio school grad who has never worked any real sessions before or anything. So I get there and sure enough they have problems which they are causing. So I patch everything correctly this time and get it set so the mic sounds good, then I check the headphones which are all distorted because he is sending almost 0dBfs worth of mix into the cue amps. So Again I adjust it so it is all sounding good. At this point they should be good to go. It's only taking them a week as they move slow. Now at this point I am thinking it's all finish, they can do their thing and I won't have to come out again but that didn't happen. More issues with the mains this time it had to do with the crossover/speaker management box. Someone tried to readjust it causing an imbalance in level between the mains. So I adjust it back to the studios usual settings and because it is completely digital I was able to lock people out via the software. This proved well except there were still analog pots one could move on the front. The studio manager didn't want to put a rack panel to block access so ultimately I ended up coming back 2 more times because people adjusted it. I also had to deal with tweeters 3 X more times. After the second time I installed fuses to the tweeters which didn't help until I realized that fuse for peek was a moot point and should fuse for average level. I also had to replace woofers again on the NS10's. All in all they went through 20 X tweeters for the mains and 4 X ns 10 woofers. That was in a total of 2.5 weeks. That is just the speakers. As I previously mentioned the engineer was fresh out of school so I had to do his job at times too, setting up the mic, getting levels, cue mixes, etc, etc. Some time in the course of my trips out there He asks me " why come you can't smoke in the control room?" I responded with "it gives the gear cancer." He says "really? why don't they make the gear to handle smoke cause we like to smoke up in here" Now the console actually has the audio going through the switches, is a 40 years old API and smoke gets the switches dirty and then stuff doesn't work properly. But they ignored that and smoked all the time in the control room. Now that is just on a technical side. The studio resides in a neighborhood among houses. The neighbors would call the studio manager and complain about the loud music at all hours. Now as far as loud, it was so loud in the control room that me being in there with 33db reduction ear plugs was painful. So that's how loud it was. It got to the point where the studio manager was like call the cops. At one time the clients were hot boxing pot in their car and harassed the neighbors girl friend trying to pick her up. At one point they closed off the street to film a video without a permit or permission from the neighbors. When the neighbors went to complain was met with a gun being shown in a attempt to scare the neighbor and it worked. So at this point there are so many complaints that the studio manager kicks them out. Was only 3 weeks. Took them over a week to move all their sh*t out. In that time the trashed/broke all kinds of furniture, broke toilets, flooded toilets to the point water leaked into the studio from the above floor, blow out every freaking speaker as they decided to bypass the fuses I installed, and did more damage then the initial studio deposit.
Now i honestly don't mind having to visit studios multiple times a day or anything of the sort but when dealing with people who don't understand or ignore the basics of audio ultimately causing damage I have to fix, it gets annoying pretty quickly. It gets even more annoying when the problem is directly related to things the client does or doesn't do. Because they were cheap not wanting to hire the studio assistant, I have to go field such things. For example client saying it's "distorted" and you get there and see every meter in the red. But yet it's not their fault or anything. The studio manager who got to the point he didn't want to field any of it was a bonus.
But the best part is how everyone involved on the studio side warned the owner of all the hassles that would happen before the session was officially booked and said owner ultimately decided the cash was more important.
All in all the were there a total of a month before they were out the door.
this pretty much covers the story and all that went on. I may have left out a thing or two but that's most of it and you get the idea.
