Quality issues with Tekton speakers....


I was reading all the buzz about these Tekton speakers and after sorting through all the reviews, decided to order a pair of the Pendragon (the big ones... $2,500 a pair).

When they arrived, I found them to be boxed well and in perfect shape, although one thing was very noticeable once I looked at the speakers. The woofers had a slightly different tone (color). The upper woofer in each tower was basically dark gray or black (like most paper woofers you might come across) and the lower woofers were slightly blue in color. After looking on the web some, I could not find a Pendragon speaker photo ANYWHERE that had this color difference. Since they did not come with speaker grilles, I knew the color difference would bother me as long as I owned the speakers.

I contacted Tekton (Eric Alexander) via e-mail and explained the issue. After almost a week of not hearing back, I sent another e-mail and his response was...

(copy and pasted right from my e-mail)... " I'm sorry. Please refresh my memory. What seems to be the problem? Thanks, Eric"

I described the issue again and he offered to exchange the speakers. I said there was no need to ship back a huge pair of 85 pound speakers and have him send me another pair and suggested maybe he just send me grilles at no charge to cover the speakers and I could live with the slight color difference in the woofers. I really feel that grilles should be included in a $2,500 price tag however.

All of these e-mails took several days to answer by the way.

He agreed and said he would get the grilles out right away... they were sent a few days later and upon arrival, I realized there was a pretty big problem. I had a normal type speaker grill with 4 pegs on the back and a speaker with no peg holes. After all the time, e-mails, no answers, etc., I was not interested in wasting any more time with the matter and asked for a partial refund through PayPal and asked a simple question... why send me grilles for a speaker that he just shipped to me with no holes to put them in? His reply was to offer to make new grilles and send "velcro dots" to affix them to the speakers with.... WOW.

The WORST part about all this: Within 30 minutes of making a PayPal claim about the issue and asking for a partial refund from him, Eric tried to call me right away... now that there was money at stake.

The really sad part of all this is that the speakers actually sound pretty damn good now that they are broken in... I just hope the quality and communication come up to the same level for the sake of Tekton as a company.
128x128audiofreak32
Wow, this thread has me bewildered. People talking about how everything is cool because the company offered an exchange. But nobody is asking if the company offered to pay for the shipping to enable the exchange. Otherwise, how is it "very fair" for a buyer to eat the cost of returning speakers that SHOULD HAVE BEEN QUALITY CHECKED IN THE FIRST PLACE. How can one say it's "beyond the call of duty" to offer an exchange without knowing who's bearing the cost burden of that exchange?? I see comments like "Can't get much better service than that" and think "well, yeah you can, it's called having the speakers be right the first time". Speakers, to many people, aren't just sound-producing devices...they're furniture, to be admired visually. Having matching driver colors, where the match was intended, isn't trivial.

This isn't like ordering a 6-piece McNuggets and getting to your table and finding only 5 in the box and having to spend 90 seconds walking back to the counter to ask for the missing food. Re-boxing and re-shipping those things isn't a walk in the park, yet people seem to be trivializing that process.

You can toss out the delayed communication, the grill issue, the refund request, all of that. There's no getting around the fact that one of two things happened at the point of fulfillment of this order. Either 1) The builder never noticed that the drivers didn't match, in which case...WTF? Or 2) the builder did notice that the drivers didn't match, but thought to himself "eh, wtf..."

It seems like too many people here have been conditioned to accept mediocrity and just take it and keep smiling. Either that or there are some Tekton fans here dealing with a truckload of cognitive dissonance and no matter how this went the OP was going to come out of it looking unreasonable.

If Tekton did in fact offer to pay the cost of shipping both ways, I'd be happy to know it and would adjust my thinking accordingly.



Well said Bcgator...

The speakers should have been correct BEFORE LEAVING his shop.... it's called QUALITY CONTROL. Do you want to pay $2,500 for a pair of speakers, then they arrive and have a NOTICEABLY different color between the woofers ON THE SAME SPEAKER?

Ship back? The boxes ARE HUGE!!! And weigh almost 90 pounds each. Even if he were to offer to to that, the cost would be in the hundreds of dollars. He agreed to send a pair of grilles at no charge, fine. BUT HOW THE HELL DO THE ATTACH TO THE SPEAKERS???

The WORST part is the lack of communication... it is next to impossible to get an answer from him on anything for a week, then when I start a PayPal claim, he calls me personally on my cell phone with 20 minutes!!!!
Why not just swap out for the right color woofer cones. Replacing the woofers is easy. Not rocket science.
That was another option.... if I could get a response from the guy. I really wanted to have grilles and I asked more than twice about the grilles with no answer. Now I have to modify the grilles to get them to work.
The "mismatched" woofer colors have gone from slightly different to NOTICEABLY different. You ordered the loudspeakers without grills, the manufacturer gave you free grills (a $75 value), but you're still not happy.