Let me start off by saying that I'm sorry if anybody has sent emails to me without getting a response. I respond to every email that I receive, so if you haven't heard from me, then it's because I haven't received the email. I have no doubt that the problem is on my end. My email host is GoDaddy.com and their email service for shellbrooklab.com has been something less than robust over the past couple of months.
Shellbrook Audio Lab sells around 100 amps a month. I build them all and my wife ships them. It's a part-time job for me, about four hours a day, plus weekends. For those who think that I'm rolling in dough from this operation, the margins on the amplifiers are not all that great, so don't think that I'm in this for the money.
Over the past year, I've built and shipped over 1,000 amplifiers. In that period, I've gone through some god-awful growing pains. Last January and February that peaked to the point that I stopped taking orders for nearly two months so that I could catch up and reorganize. Since April, things have been running much more smoothly, although you may not be able to tell that from reading this thread. Out of about 500 shipped amplifiers, I've responded to ten to twenty complaints, mostly relating to late deliveries. I've resolved every complaint that I've received, with the exception of two. I have had no contact from those two, although I believe that one of them has posted in this thread, so I am contacting him via PM to find out. That means that if you have an unresolved problem, it's because I don't know about it. PM me here!
The issue over at iPodStudio is unfortunate. I received an email on Tuesday from him regarding complaints that he said that he'd received. I spent Wednesday trying to track down the problems, only to find that on Thursday, the storefront was closed. I'll say here what I said there. Duncan pulled the trigger very quickly. Duncan also has never paid Shellbrook Audio for any merchandise that was sold through the store, nor has he responded to my emails or PMs asking about it.
I'm not going to address specific customer complaints in this forum, but I am going to follow up every one of them via PMs. Feel free to contact those individuals to find out the results - or they are, of course, free to post what happens as well. Likewise, I am not going to respond to anyone on this forum who has spoken up against me (or for me), yet who has not has any relationship with me.
I've PM'd Jude regarding the sticky in the Feedback forum. Because of issues going on that are separate from this thread, I will not address that either, until I hear from Jude.
Here's the long and the short of it. Most of the business that I do is driven through Head-Fi or iPodStudio. As I said before, that's over a hundred amps a month. Without belittling the issues from customers raised here, that's a lot of satisfied customers. Every now and then, somebody takes me up on the no questions asked refund. And, every now and then, something goes tragically wrong. If I know about it, then I try to fix it. If I don't know about it, then I can't fix it. And if there is fault to be laid, I'll take it squarely.
I'm no William Goody, let's be clear on that. I'm just a guy who sells a lot of amplifiers at a decent price - and, for better or for worse, it occaisionally ends up giving me some relatively crushing business.
I'll be sending out a number of PMs to those who have posted here to find out who they are and why I don't know what's been going on. The problems will be resolved.
Thanks,
Drew