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Sounds like trouble


Posted by Nate in Projects, Wedding.
Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 7:02 pm

Our ceremony will be outside, and I’ve been worried about sound — will the trees "swallow" the sound?  What if there’s water in the creek?  I’d been planning on some wireless battery-powered "something" to solve this problem, and a few weeks ago I thought I’d found it: a Pyle Pro PWMA3600.  (Don’t worry, it was on Amazon for like $80 less than that)

I’m sad to report it was a Pyle of crap, or rather, they were.  That’s right, I got two…

Pyle Pro 1The first one arrived and I excitedly set it up, adding an external speaker as advertised to increase the spread – it sounded great!  The included wireless mic seemed very responsive and feedback-free.  I wrapped up my test and went to turn it off – and nothing happened.  Music continued to play.  Hmm.  "That’s going to wear down the battery pretty quick," I thought to myself.  An hour spent fiddling with it didn’t improve the situation and I noticed some pretty visible sparking when I went to plug in the adaptor to charge it.  Whoa.  Rather than messing with it I further took advantage of Amazon’s amazingly customer-friendly return policy and asked for a new unit.  "They can’t all be bad!" I confidently told Karen.

…except they are.  The second one arrived yesterday and I carefully removed the layer of foam wrapping and opened the box.  I reached in and took hold of the handle to remove the unit, and…  guess.  Guess what happened.

Pyle Pro 2That’s right, it came right off – the whole lid.  Followed by the sides falling into the middle, like a cartoon house collapsing.  I never even got it out of the box.

The good news is, this is all happening with almost 3 months to spare, so I’ll get it figured out.  And it sure makes my online searches go quicker when I can skim over any Pyle Pro products without even clicking.  Grrrr…

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5 Responses to “Sounds like trouble”

  1. Mary Jo Says:
    June 21st, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    Have you tried looking a Brookstone? I don’t know if they would have anything or not, but it’s worth a try–or how about a Radio Shack or Best Buy? Now if it’s only for music we could all just sing–if it’s to hear the ceremony then you could just use megaphones, they’re a lot cheaper.

  2. Peter Says:
    June 22nd, 2007 at 7:55 am

    hey, I was thinking after we talked the other day that the local event rental probably have cordless speaker systems. This place (which I don’t know anything about) says they rent ’em for $45 for a 5 day period. Midway would also be worth a shot . . .

  3. Nate Says:
    June 22nd, 2007 at 10:19 am

    @Peter: Good call. I was shying away from rentals for some reason, like I thought we’d be up there too long and it would cost extra, but 5 days is pretty good. And that XP-300 seems like a really nice unit… Hmm. My current plan is to try to simplify and re-use some of the gear I already have, we’ll see how far that takes me.

  4. Q Says:
    June 22nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm

    Please, oh please do your entire service with a megaphone. That would be so awesome.

  5. Your Cousin Kym Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 4:44 pm

    You know…the one who works with equipment like this for a living and all??? *cough*

    You can easily rent a small PA/mic and speakers from any music store for your event darlin’ and at a fraction of the cost of the crap you tried to buy from Amazon.

    However if you have your heart set on owning a PA, go to http://www.musiciansfriend.com and look through what they’ve got. Pretty reliable stuff. You can get a “DJ in a box” type system complete with PA, speakers, CDplayers, etc., for about what you’d have spent on that other unit ($300).

    *smooch* Wish I could be there!!!