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Tekton custom grills

There are some active discussions concerning the delivery of speakers and specifically speaker grills for the incredible Tekton Speakers. But nothing on this forum. I'm now nine months waiting on grill delivery. Anyone else??
128x128brianpack
audiofreak32's avatar
audiofreak32
281 posts
 
Original poster here... (back after several years and on my 4th pair of Tekton speakers)....
I recently bought another pair of Tekton speakers (Enzo XL) about 2 months ago and ordered with grills (+ $75).  I like the way they look with the grills and have 2 small kids and the sound difference is negligible with or without them on. 

I got the speakers in decent time... they smelled pretty bad of pain odor and the finish is fairly poor.... if you run your hand over any of the surfaces (even the top), you will easily feel smooth and rough differences.
I waited about 4 weeks before bothering them with an e-mail about the grills.Never heard anything, sent another e-mail about 2 weeks after that and got a reply about 3 days later with a FedEx tracking number.  I thought... awesome... the grills are on the way.  When the grills arrived, the package looked fine and was not damaged.  The grills seemed to be packed well also.  But, once I took them out to fit them to the speakers, I noticed that 3 of the 4 corners on EACH grill were cracked/broken.  Literally, these grills were made from 4 pieces of 3/4" x 3/4" MDF (approx.) and glued in the corners.... THAT IS ALL. Being that these speakers are so tall, there really should be an intermediate cross-brace and triangle corner braces for strength, with nails/glue through the corners...  these grills were just total garbage.  Also, the pegs in the grills did not line up well at all with the holes in the cabinets!  I had to force/bend the grills into place.  I could have easily built better grilles myself and saved time and money.
So I sent an e-mail to Eric (which Karma also sees all the e-mails I think) asking for a refund figuring that another set of the same horribly-built speaker grills would do me no good... he apologized and said that he would have Karma "....call me on Monday".  Never got a call from her.  Waited about 10 more days and sent a follow-up e-mail and got a reply saying that she would call me later that day.  Never heard back from her.
At this point, I really do not care about the grills or the refund... too much time invested on my part.

I absolutely LOVE the sound from these speakers, but these details are killing me.... like they say... the devil is in the details.

#1:   MAKE & SHIP THE GRILLES WITH THE GD SPEAKERS ! ! !

#2:   HIRE MORE PEOPLE ! ! !
missioncoonery
1,223 posts
 
This post was originally listed in 2013,thats 5 years later with the same poor customer service..I heard the monitor and imo it sucked to put it bluntly.Why bother with this company?
craigl59
307 posts
 

Missioncoonery writes:

"Why bother with this company?"

It's because the speakers sound so good. Plain and simple. Eric doesn't place importance on grills and you have to force his hand and, yes, Karma is the one to deal with.

No other speaker company is even close to Eric's quality level at his price points and saving on customer service is one of the reasons why he can offer such impressive speakers at closeout prices.

So I put up with the CS in order to get a great product at the best possible price. If you want great customer service, spend 5 or 10 times as much and go with a fine company such as Wilson.

jetter
3,035 posts
 
craig, do the math.  If you hire one additional person to build grills, the expense of that one person spread over all the speakers sold is not going to come close to increasing the speaker cost by 5 or 10 times.  $50,000/1,000 speakers sold = $50 per speaker.  CS is CS.    
craigl59
307 posts
 

jetter:

You should send your ideas to Eric, by way of Karma at tektondesign@gmail.com. Threads such as this will serve some purpose but direct contact is always more efficient.

Three Points

First, inexpensive CS is ONLY ONE of the ways in which Eric saves business costs. Other areas are 1) no/little advertising, 2) brilliant product development but without traditional methods/time/costs, 3) Small physical plant, 4) direct sales, and 5) careful driver selection. Eric probably could tell you many others.

Second, a good portion of my corporate career was spent in quality assurance at customer service centers. CS is very expensive and at smaller companies takes a disproportionate amount of the budget. Eric handles a lot of contact himself and Karma helps with most of the rest. This can be an ideal approach if done properly. Sometimes, however, personalities conflict.

Third, whenever I start buying from a company such as Tekton, one of my goals is to help them succeed because their success is also mine. Have the DIs and am considering either another set or the Ulfberhts. It is, consequently, IN MY BEST INTERESTS for Eric to continue and prosper. Suggest that all Tekton owners fall into this category.

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