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Neumann cap repair

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mountainhop:

--- Quote from: H₂O on August 26, 2022, 07:23:44 PM ---I don't think Schoeps will repair anything older than 10 years any more.  They changed their Service approach and right before the change offered huge discounts to send in old gear to be exchanged for new gear.

--- End quote ---

they certainly do, for current products. i have some 20+ year old caps in there now. pricing tiers are based on age. they actually do a lot to bring gear back to spec, not just the bare minimum of repairs. if they were a matched pair they will go as far as trying to restore the match, which they can do to some degree


--- Quote from: rigpimp on August 24, 2022, 04:36:17 PM ---I had a CCM4 hit a wood floor HARD when a lady kicked my stand over at a cello concert.  It cost me a couple of months without a mic and $900 to repair.  I literally had to sit down for a bit after opening that invoice.

Also, I was told by Germany that if the cosmetics do not affect the sonics they won't rehouse the guts because of aesthetic blemishes/dings/dents.


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damn. they probably treated that ccm as if it was a two-part piece for which they get 300-400 each in their pricing/ or perhaps the ccm itself has extra costs due to design

DSatz:
Sorry I didn't see this thread sooner. Last thing first--yes, at Schoeps a CCM is treated for service purposes as an amplifier plus a capsule, so the age-dependent flat rate is applied twice. The rationale for this is that electronics and capsules are separate departments, and the unit has to go through all the procedures in both departments (never mind that they're right next to each other on the second floor). Either repair might be classed as major or minor and billed accordingly, but a hard drop could cause major damage to both main components of a CCM.

I'm sorry that this happened to you. I've dropped a few capsules myself, and I still remember the awful feeling.

--Schoeps no longer offers service for products that predate the Colette system. In 2024 the Colette series will have its 50th anniversary (!). During that time many individual product types have come and gone, and the supply of spare parts for certain products has run out--three-pattern capsules, sadly, being among them. But service is definitely available for all current products and some older, discontinued types--just not all of them.

--What was said about product service and (basically) product renewal is true. All repairs at Schoeps are made by the same people who build the regular, current production in both departments. [Edited later to add: Actually this is not quite true any more with electronic products, which are sometimes repaired now by a person who does only repairs and doesn't build new units.] The main reason for the tiered price structure is that older products, especially capsules, tend to need more new parts and more time, labor and expertise to install them. This isn't done when they feel it wouldn't matter, though, and in each of the three age categories, there's a lower fee if the repairs can be considered minor, e.g. just replacing some small, readily accessible parts and checking everything, as often occurs.

--Neumann technically calls the whole assembly a "capsule head" and the innards a "capsule", while Schoeps calls the assembly a "capsule" and considers its housing and innards to be components of that. I'm neither a spokesperson for Schoeps nor obviously for Neumann, but to the best of my knowledge Neumann USA doesn't repair capsules at all--they replace them if they're defective, period. But in Germany, while Neumann microphones are all made at the Sennheiser factory now, they also have (or at least until a few years ago used to have) a small repair facility in Berlin that does specialized, one-off kinds of work. They have some parts on hand for "vintage" models there, though by no means a complete stock.

So officially Neumann's policy is that they're willing to try to repair any microphone that they've ever made, at least to get it working again--even if it can't necessarily meet its performance specifications. But if a microphone needs a part that they no longer have, sometimes they can make more or less adequate substitutions and sometimes they can't. There's a limit to how far any policy can go when the means to carry it out aren't on hand.

--best regards

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