The inferior design (buyer beware) thread

[SPACERITUAL]

I’ve personally had bad experiences with, or received bad product from:

Electrical Guitar Company
Dunable Guitars
Harvester Guitars
MPLS Guitars
Audible Disease
Lone Wolf Audio
Abominable Electronics

What happened with Dunable? Don't tell me they're not the greatest thing ever?

It was one of his really early builds when he was just making them in his garage and just wasn’t all that great. He shipped it to my in a gig bag that was caked with dirt and looked like it had toured the asscrack of the world for about thirty years. The tremolo was mounted crookedly. The workmanship was just not great. Sound wasn’t all that great either. I think there’s a thread floating around with pictures and stuff.

He corrected the flaws and screwups but it was just amateur hour. It looks like he’s kinda gotten his act together, although lawn chair got one more recently and said it was really underwhelming. I played some recently that were nice and all but sounded about like a Korean guitar would. Nothing offensively bad but just lifeless and bland.

[rfurtkamp]

Add one that pure cheapness in design/manufacturing and lack of foresight made inevitable inevitable.

Pardon the lazy photo (did it while on the phone with Sweetwater, where it was still under their 'replace' coverage for nothing):



The side expression jack (one of the reasons to buy the thing on the Barn9 Eventide expansion buttons/expression jack) mounted next to the right footswitch has NO reinforcement at all.

If you use a straight TRS cable (which most are), and step down even a hair off, the entire cheap plastic non-reinforced jack dies instantly. The nut is connected to..nothing but plastic.

I got a replacement and ordered a right angle TRS cable to use that will mitigate the issue, but Barn3's warranty/support line doesn't work. ALL mail to it bounces, etc.

Truly shitty customer service from them, claiming to be a small musician focused business.

[backwardsvoyager]

I’ve personally had bad experiences with, or received bad product from:

Harvester Guitars

Just found a thread on this at the OSG board....yeesh! But thank U 4 yer service

geez, that's disappointing to read..
mine's collecting dust 5000 miles away so I can't really talk, but I did enjoy it for a while (gigged it for ~3yrs without any issues)
..then the frets started lifting bigtime and the nut fell off and I should have just taken it to a luthier but was having wrist problems and switched to a strandberg instead (no regrets)

what happened w/ yours, spacey? i remember a pretty glowing review at the time.

[Phosphene Audio]

I’ve personally had bad experiences with, or received bad product from:

Electrical Guitar Company

The EGC I had was one of my least favorite guitars ever, but in my case, I don't know that there was anything wrong with it, just that it wasn't for me.






Now, a guitar that I liked very much, despite it's numerous design flaws was a Parker Nite Fly.


I got it around 97 or 98. One thing that was odd right off the bat was that it had internal piezos in the bridge, but no on board preamp for them. I think the regular tone control did affect them when they were switched on, but it wasn't particularly useful.

Also, the bridge saddles had two ball bearings that the strings sat at the junction of. They were supposed to be held captive by the saddle design, but more than one popped out. Parker (aka Korg at the time) refused to replace the saddles. The solution was to buy ball bearings at a hardware store and super glue them in place.

Not long after I bought the guitar, I drove with it, in the summer, but in an air conditioned car, for about 45 minutes. Upon playing it, and bending a note, I was quite surprised when the note did not bend normally, and that all six strings moved together. The dab of whatever they used to attach the nut had let go and it was sliding around. Again, super glue fixed the problem.

Lastly, the neck always had too much relief, and this got worse over time, even with the truss rod adjusted as far as it would go. Parker told me my model had a basswood neck (carbon fiber encased, of course) and that I should try 9s instead of 10s.

I like the body and neck shape and thought it sounded great, though. The Nite Fly bodies were deep enough that one could change out the pickups. I was using EMGs back then.

[TheTransient]

A short list of reasons I got sick of hyped up boutique pedals:

Collision Devices Black Hole Symmetry - delay section caused a noticeable volume drop (no internal adjustment pot to fix it) and dulled my clean signal from memory. Hole for DC jack was drilled AFTER the enclosure was powder coated, so the bare metal stood out like a sore thumb. Ended up returning it, was very disappointed as I generally liked the sound/idea of it. I think I had a pretty early one though, so they might have rectified those issues in more recent build, not sure, but wont be risking buying another to find out.

Fairfield Meet Maude - liked the sound overall, but found I had to really dig in on my Telecaster to make the delay register anything. So if I played softly, I'd basically get no repeats back from the pedal regardless of my settings. Emailed Fairfield about it and they had no thoughts, no suggestions, just a big "eh I dunno" shrug in the form of an email. Not sure if it was just my unit or if that's how they all are, but sold that one on.

Red Panda Context V2 - once again, sounded decent, but that wasn't the issue. PC editor software (or was it just web-based? cant recall now) was shithouse, barely worked. Blend control options sucked. Stock wet/dry mix meant I always lost dry volume when bringing in the reverb. Could have unaffected dry though but that meant certain functions like the tremolo on the Spring mode wouldn't work. So it wasn't faulty per se, but for the price of that pedal I feel like that was basic shit to have sorted. Sold that one on too.

Diamond Memory Lane Jr/Quantum Leap - on the older ones I found that the LFO leaked into the dry signal even when the pedal was disengaged if you had it in buffered bypass/trails mode. Had to keep it in true bypass mode. Not sure if that's still the case with this new batch they've done.

[le lambin]

Let’s talk about those Boss make your own cable kits. I bought one years ago when they first came out, had no problems. They were cheaper than comparable kits and I still have nearly all of them today. I recently needed some small diameter patch cables with custom lengths for a project, so I went ahead and got another pack of them. I don’t know what’s happened between when they first came out and now, but god damn this is the worst kit I’ve had the displeasure of using.

The cable is exactly the same diameter as the hole on the connector- making it impossible to slide all the way in to make contact with the internal pin due to the friction. When I try to force it in, the cable jacket buckles and bunches up around the entrance to the connector, making it even more difficult to get in there.

I eventually used some lubricant around the cable jacket and inside the connector to make it easier to slide in, and they just barely made contact with the internal pin. I had to do this with all the connectors, 12 in total. Testing the cables out, only 1 out of 6 worked- the other 5 were not properly grounded.

I re-cut and re-assembled the other 5 cables, and they still had grounding issues. No matter how I assemble them, they have grounding issues and are effectively useless.

I should have listened to all the shit reviews in internet land, but didn’t. Don’t be like me- stay away from these!

[dubkitty]

i've heard so many bad things about pretty much every major brand of cable kits that i just avoid them.