EQU47 Mic Bodies | Orders open on January 19th 2013

[JoeMorris]

Just to repeat, any unwanted Euro bodies will find a grateful home here in London SE4...

 

[Kingston]

Got the two mics today. I have been on high tolerance mood for these expected china quality problems. Now that I have these at hand I can't help but be disappointed. The general quality and feel is worse than the cheapest thomann mics I have had this far.

Other has headbasket ok, body has stairstepped stripes and one good bump on the side. Dropped on the factory floor? This was somewhat like I expected and actually previously described by you Skylar. No problems.

The other has a completely bent headbasket, and the top part is rounded. I guess this one was used to bash in the head the employer who dropped the previous mic. I can fix that. Still no problems.

But the body is completely different color than the other! It completely lacks what I suspect was supposed to be bead blasting and actually has a nice starshine-sparkle finish.

"What a perfect stereo pair."

The image only slightly communicates how striking the difference is in daylight and how different light falls on them.

Here's some well deserved critique to you Skylar, as well.  It's not your fault they are different color, but at least you could have easily prevented this. You were the last link resembling quality control but did not even bother opening the boxes. "Why?" would be a very valid question, and "it would have taken too much time" is the wrong answer after nine months of waiting.

What am I supposed to do? Is there some homespun way to get these colors to match? Very fine sandpaper, perhaps, lets say 2400 grade? What kind of paint is that "starshine" if I want them to match in that direction instead?

Or should I just send them back already, or perhaps just the mismatch tubes themselves?

Mike

PS. I really like that starshine-sparkle, even if it is a mistake. Much better than the bead blasting industrial stair band fiasco that resulted from the additional step when it was beautiful already. Too bad you had to please the U47 clone crowd.

[edit]

inspected the color issue further. I didn't see it earlier but the mic that has the expected striping/banding is actually not painted/processed to completion. About 1/3, maybe half, of it has no surface processing of any kind. It's just plain unreflective aluminum. Goddamed the finish is Sh*tty on this one!  

 

[nhaudio]

Hey Skylar,

what will be the discount on the bodies?


Nicolas

 

[e.oelberg]

btw  a german manufacture offers 6m tube mic cable with tuchel and xlr for 62€. I don't know anything about the quality of the cable but the price is quite good
http://www.powertechnik.com/aid=101.phtml


nicholas

 

[TornadoTed]

I got mine last week and paid £36.78 import duty and fees in the UK.

Thank you yet again for all of your hard work in making this happen.

 

[noulou]

Got them today.

I am extremely pleased. Thanks Skylar.

 

[Kingston]

Hi Skylar, should I mail you about this botched surface non-matching pair issue? I mean in case you are not happy to talk about it in public. I considered the information quite vital for everyone, but I can remove the above pictures and stuff if it's not cool.

Mike

 

[sethyrish]

Got mine.
Very happy
Cheers

 

[moamps]

Hi,

Received bodies today.

Thank you Skylar.

 

[FerrariT]

As I said before any of you who are unhappy with the quality of your microphone body please there are a bunch of us waiting for these! Me and several others will be glad to take them off your hands consider THAT a FULL refund and you can wait for the next batch if you desire to be fickle.

Skylar I will buy anyones. "Damaged" microphone body.

 

[Skylar]

Kingston-

First of all, I am truly sorry that the finishes do not match on your two units.
It was not my intention to ship units with finishes so far out of tolerance.

Both of the bodies you have are bead-blasted and anodized. The difference is that the sparkly one was bead-blasted with coarser media; it is not paint.
I may not understand what you mean by "stairstepped stripes."
Are you referring to tooling grooves left by the lathing process?
The bead-blasting is supposed to minimize the appearance of these tooling marks.
On the >100 mic bodies that I have looked at, I can only see evidence of such tooling marks under 10x magnification or greater; I cannot see tool marks with the naked eye (or in your photo).
Can you help me understand the "stairstepped stripes" with further description or closer photos perhaps?

Again, the purpose of the bead-blasting is to reduce imperfections in the finish like tooling marks and nicks/scratches from handling.
It seems that you're saying you would prefer the finish straight off of the lathe without the bead-blasting process. But, trust me, the samples I have with a straight mill finish have enough scratches, coolant marks, and other little blemishes from handling that make the bead-blasted finishes look like world-class jewelry. If you are this displeased about the bead-blasted finish, I am sure you be even further displeased with a non-bead-blasted finish.


Here are some options to consider:

- Send the body or bodies back for a full refund
- Sell the body or bodies on the BM (probably at a profit if you want)
- Keep the units as they are or refinish them to your liking

Unfortunately, we have 0 extra units with which to exchange them. In fact, a few people who placed pre-orders didn’t get any mic bodies at all (my email to them was posted earlier in this thread by martinme). This stemmed from the fact that the manufacturer told us it would be no problem to add more units to the end of the order. However, once the number of sold units started approaching 150, we contacted the manufacturer to add another 100 units to the order, but they refused to do so. We closed the preorder as soon as we found out we would be unable to order additional units, which put us at 198 units if I recall correctly. Since we found a number of units that we felt were just too defective to ship (body tubes were not milled all the way through was the big problem with these units), we were unable to fulfill the orders of the last few who purchased.

Once we received the full shipment, we had a choice to make: Inspect every single unit and remove ones we didn’t want to ship, depriving even more people of a mic body, or ship the units and let each person decide whether the bodies are acceptable to them. I QA'ed roughly half of the units to make sure there weren't a serious amount of problems. As of now, no one has requested a refund who has received a body. But, of course, we are happy to refund in full anyone who wishes to send their mic body back to us.


I try to be a humble person, but I do think it is worth noting that this project has demanded more of my time (literally thousands of hours) than even my regular full-time job has and nearly $10,000 of my personal funds for the benefit of the DIY community. Considering these two things, I am losing money on this endeavor big-time. I did not chose to take on this project for the purpose of making a fat profit—if I had, the mic bodies would have been priced at $500–900 like the Flea, AMI, Beez Neez, etc. bodies. I am pointing this out because I think that $200 is still a good deal for these mic bodies even if the finishes don't match. I also want you guys to know that I'm trying to help you out as much as I can.


We are still trying to negotiate a 2nd production run, but as you might imagine, getting a factory to take a 200-unit-order seriously and adhere to strict quality standards when they have multi-thousand-unit orders from other bigger customers is quite difficult. If you wish to return your units for a refund and wait on the 2nd batch, we will guarantee you a spot in the 2nd batch. We are planning on inspecting and returning any units that don't match our specifications (BEFORE we've paid the invoice) the next time around, so you would get two units with matching finish. We would have done that on the first batch, but we had not established credit with the vendor, so we had to pay up front.


P.S. your math is incorrect regarding "nine months of waiting." Pre-ordering opened on 28 July 2010; the mic bodies shipped 7 March 2011. That's 7.4 months. I know that you and I will agree 7.4 months is a brutal amount of time to wait, but 7.4 is not equal to 9.

 

[desol]

How is the negotiating/discussions going with the manufacturer thus far Skylar?

 

[Kingston]

Thank you Skylar for the explanation. I'm very surprised even the sparkly one is a bead blasting finish. It feels like paint/plastic, but now that I think about it, it's just the coarse surface being worse at heat transfer compared to the plain aluminum one.

I'll have to think about what to do with this botched surface, send it back, fix it, or sell it.

I can't seem to take good pictures of the stairstepping effect. I haven't got a good enough camera. It basically looks like some machine scratched the surface down/up direction. You can kind of see it on the above picture. The "blocky" gradient of the bottom mic isn't jpeg format problem, the mic actually looks like that.

I guess I could take a picture of the 1/3 of the surface processing that is completely missing, but on this camera it just shows as non-reflective area (plain aluminum).


By the way, what is the finish on this prototype picture?

http://equinoxsystems.net/wp-content/uploads/images/products/EQMBU47/EQMBU47_f1_2.jpg

It's different to either of the two I have. Looks like plain aluminum.

 

[Skylar]

How is the negotiating/discussions going with the manufacturer thus far Skylar?

Let's just say I'm looking at several other options—all of which are either in Germany or the U.S.

 

[e.oelberg]

I gave to mic bodies (for another project) to gleyer galvanik. They did the finish for all neumann west products the last 50 year. They did a great job but it costed me almost 80 euros, there is a reason to produce in china

nicholas

 

[riggler]

Skylar, I sent you an important email about a US manufacturer that I personally work with.

 

[withnail]

What are the different options available for completing these guys?  I got in on the buy but now feel overwhelmed in regards to figuring out what to put in it...

 

[desol]

There are a few different options available. There's the mk7 project, the mk47 and i think the g7 will work too...
Try and search a bit for these and see if you can find some kits around. They are all good projects.

 

[fuzzbox]

Well according to my tracking # ,my mic has been in customs for 25 days.... anyone else in Canada waiting on theres?

 

[Sredna]

... now feel overwhelmed in regards to figuring out what to put in it...

Peanuts!  ;D