About 2 months ago I did a total cleaning and rebuild to the studio and the Multiface started having a problem. I didn't have any problems for all the months previous as my setup remained fairly static. However when I disconnected & reconnected everything to do the studio clean/rebuild, output 3/4 slowly got worse as time passed. Initially I thought it might be my mixer (have an older Sountracs 8bus). In retrospect I think its obvious that the socket was somehow defective and I should have paid more attention at the time, but hey things worked great for months so I forgot about it Eventually the output levels from that output channel dropped quite noticeably and there was nasty static-like noise coming out of output4 with almost no volume at all. I've been busy the last month or so and kept putting off getting it fixed, but finally I found some time last week.
When I contacted RME via email they informed me that I would be fastest served by going through 'my distributor'. I called Audiomidi.com and a fellow named Tim answered the phone, I explained my situation and he asked me to forward the email that RME had sent. Apparently RME did have a US distributor who would normally handle such things, but Tim said that he would just expedite everything for me so that I could be back in operation as quickly as possible. The next day I recieved a confirmation email that a UPS package was on the way to me, and he sent an email explaining that there was a return postage shipping label included in the package. Yesterday I recieved the package and swapped out the units, and this morning I returned the faulty unit via the prepaid UPS sticker--no cost to me at all!
I have to say that Audiomidi.com (and Tim) could have just bounced this off to the distributor (he did give me their name in an email and on the phone) but instead not only did Tim provide excellent followup, he even took care of all shipping costs and I didn't have to go longer than the time it took to swap out the units. Almost made me want to drop more money on new toys at the same time!
I'm completely happy with my RME setup here, and I suspect that the fault with the unit isn't something typical as these units are marketed as being an excellent mobile solution (and many people including SOS reviewers use them as such) so if this were a typical problem I suspect RME wouldn't have the reputation they do. In any case I wanted to share the excellent service that Audiomidi.com gave to me. This was in no way solicited by Tim or audiomidi.com but I have sent an email to him with this topic linked.
