All the rental places I have worked for and rented from make the time to maintain stuff, but thats how they keep me coming back. I've used enough
beat up gear to know who to ignore and never go back to. Easier said than done in some markets.
Please PM me with the name of your employers. The ones I have used do vary, but all
send me stuff I have to clean up on my own.
I don't mind cheaper stuff a lot of the time, but with wireless mics I really prefer to pay more 1 time rather than constantly have to repair stuff.
The reason I love Control Booth is that knowledgeable people--many of them serious professionals--volunteer huge amounts of good advice, just for the asking. The one piece of advice I can never take, however, is, "Spend more than you have." My colleagues and I are operating on hope, prayers, and pocket change. But, what we lack in money, we make up for with labor, so we buy cheap stuff and fix it when it breaks. No other real option.
But dealing with school groups and amateurs, the lower tier packs all seem to be plastic pieces of junk. Then you move up to the more substantial plastic or plastic/metal combo packs, and then you get to the higher tiers where the whole back is metal. I've had kids doing a
roll or whatever choreography, smash those cheaper packs, or rip the antennas off, which on the lower end, tend mean replacing the whole pack is easier. OR you could take the pain and buy the better stuff and enjoy a metal pack that can take a beating and keep ticking.
Gracious, what are your kids doing? Tributes to "Cirque du Soleil?" We have no problems with people rolling over the gear or pulling on things. I specifically train our actors, of all ages, to pull only on connectors (if they have to pull at all), never to touch a
button, and never put stress on anything. Maybe because I deal with amateurs, who tend to know how strapped we are for cash and that even having a piece of gear can be extraordinary, they respect my instructions to be careful. Consequently, metal or plastic makes no difference to me. My problems are almost never at the pack itself. They are almost always at the cable connection
point, where corrosion and mechanical slop make for intermittent connections.
I didn't notice as much until I started working with nicer stuff, but with the same amount of care, the repairs/troubleshooting/problems all declined, with with an increase in reliability. /2cents
What stuff are you working with? The rental places I've used have sent me a wide variety of makes, including
Shure,
Audio Technica, and (rarely)
Sennheiser. Though the list prices for those products can vary by factors of two to three, all have performed virtually identically. (This is not surprising. Consumer Reports has published on this repeatedly, over the years. People will simply pay more for a name they know, regardless of whether or not there is any difference in quality. Best example is batteries: in bench tests, all AA cells you can legally buy discharge along almost identical curves for all
practical loads, but you can pay literally 100% more for a famous brand as for a cut-rate
cell.)
Now, as an earlier commenter mentioned, differences do exist. Audio quality can be one of them. In my venues, however, high sound quality in the
microphone system is kind of wasted, because my sounds all go through middle school sound systems that can make a
sine wave sound like a
duck call.
I haven't been doing community theater all that long. Started in early 2016, just before I joined Control Booth. I've done about 14(?) shows since then. What I've observed is that, in the hands of amateurs, mostly performing in public school auditoriums, expensive stuff and cheap stuff behave about the same. I've also observed that, when you do
not know what you are doing, admitting that to yourself, reading the
manual, asking for help, and taking the time to learn what you need to know can also make expensive stuff and cheap stuff behave about the same, and
pretty well, at least for the purposes we amateurs in public schools have. (I suddenly wonder if the rental places give us their lesser gear, saving the best equipment for more professional customers with bigger budgets. They do know who we are, after all.)
Anyway, we have ordered a few Samson Concert 99 Earset systems. Will post a review after we have them on the bench (and the yard, as my director is going to wear one while mowing his lawn; we amateurs have to find inventive ways to do our tests, while not neglecting household chores).