Soundcraft delivery woes

[sotonfan]

Our theater handles a mixture of road shows - rock, country, jazz - as well as being the home of a large community theater company which puts on 5-10 musicals a year. For the last decade, we've had a Soundcraft Vi4 as our FoH desk. That console died over the summer, and we ordered a Vi5000 to replace it - deciding to stay in the Soundcraft world since our stage boxes were all set up for the Vi4.

Three months after ordering, our supplier is still unable to give us an ETA on our new desk. The control surface is available, but the local rack components are apparently still in transit from Hungary, or some such. I'm beginning to wonder if Soundcraft is unable to fulfill orders - and if so, if it's time to move to a different company entirely.

Anybody have any experience with ordering from Harman/Soundcraft? Is this usual? I can't keep borrowing sound boards indefinitely...

I'm not keen to have to start over with a different company, but if I had to make the move, can anyone suggest a desk to look at that would bridge the theater/concert world in a similar way to the Vi series?

Thanks all.
Andrew

 

[TimMc]

Had a show in one of our venues a couple days ago with brand new Vi3000 and remote i/o racks (MADI over CAT6, IIRC). The engineer didn't mention any delivery difficulties but we did find a bad local output on the surface.

Inventory status changes every day and Just In Time delivery is the norm, even when it's late... if you're in a position to buy a completely different brand you can cancel your order, I suppose, and deal with installing and interfacing a new desk. Not sure how you'd build a fire under your Soundcraft dealer to build a fire under Harman (they wear Nomex garments in Harman-land).

Samsung pumped $84m into Harman Pro, I'm still waiting to see where it comes back out.

 

[TimmyP1955]

Rent until you can get a Midas Heritage Digital.

 

[firewater88]

With all the consolidation with Harman gear, everything has been sent overseas and time is horrible. I have a Vi3000 and got it before all the merger happened. Looked at other gear to update our other spaces and decided to not go with Soundcraft in there due to not knowing if we could get the gear in a timely fashion.
In fact, I did the rebate trade in when it started with new AKG mics and just got my check, almost 2 years after I sent in the form. I keot on them and my contact every month. The whole company seems discombobulated since Samsung took over....

 

[TimmyP1955]

Surely you console can be repaired for a lot less than the cost of replacing?