Absolute Rubbish!

A few weeks back I placed an order for three items [Contour Shuttle Pro, Behringer BCF2000 and Behringer MiniMon 800] from Digital Village. I wanted my sister-in-law to bring them out here to Cyprus from Wales to save on delivery costs.

First problem: Credit Card payment. I used a UK Credit Card, registered to a Cyprus address. Barclaycard has this wonderful system that allows you to validate through a random series of password letters that the payment really is you... which I did. However, Digital Village's system couldn't cope with a UK credit card with a Cyprus address and a UK delivery address... hmmm... we are in the EU you know, Digital Village, which is one trading entity! Oh well, that was resolved only to find that one of the items would not arrive in time for delivery to my sister-in-law in time for her to bring it to me.

Never mind, there was a very nice girl at Digital Village called Lorraine who did all the credit card stuff manually so that it worked. And then she sorted out the extra order and the credit card payment for that. Shows human beings are more efficient than computers!

The few days delay turned out to be a few days, followed by a few days, followed by a few days. Contour should have learned arabic then they could have said it would arrive tomorrow... Still that gave me time to order some other things: a Behringer ADA8000 and two Samson CO1U mics.

Today they all arrived, by UPS. Huge package.

I took this picture with my wife sitting beside it to give some idea of scale. Of course I had to tell UPS where we live as every courier company in Cyprus seems incapable of knowing any address.

Anyway, when my son arrived back for lunch we unpacked the items. Digital Village had done well. The items were extremely well packed. There were 7 layers of packing on some items.

Now we have no re-cycling in Cyprus so all the packaging will be thrown away:
The outer layers of bubble wrap...
held together with Sellotape...
the tri-wall box inside...
the 'peanuts' inside the box...
the plastic bag for some of the items...
the cardboard outer box for some individual items...
the inner packing of the individual boxes...
the plastic mouldings...
the inner plastic bags...
the cable ties on the cables...
the plastic bags around the manuals...
all to help fill up the municipal rubbish tip.

Ooops... nearly forgot... Behringer knows we are in Europe so insists on sending a copy of each instruction manual for almost every language spoken in Europe. Which means... we have approx 6 times the number of manuals we need all of which... help fill up the municipal rubbish tip.

Now, just in case you are wondering how on earth my sister-in-law could have possibly brought all that stuff, here is another picture with the actual items highlighted in front of all the rubbish. I think they would have easily gone packed in her cases with clothes as packing!

Now to try out the equipment. Problems 1 & 2: the Behringer BCF2000 and the Contour Shuttle Pro didn't work with Final Cur Pro. Hmmm... eventually found that to make the BCF2000 work with FCP you have to press the 4th button from the left while turning on the power. The Shuttle Pro... hmmm... loads of advice on the web... all useless. Eventually downloaded a new driver and it worked like a dream.

The Samson CO1U mics... that will be the subject of another post on this blog, but the problem that people talk about of them showing up on the left hand channel only is true but easily overcome if you create an 'aggregate' mono device for the mic. Strange to aggregate two channels to one but... whatever...