This is absolutely not a surprise. Yamaha is notorious for NO PRODUCT SUPPORT. Notice that I did not say poor or sub-standard product support. I said NO product support. They have been like this for as long as I can remember. It’s really frustrating because, clearly they make great products. But with no support system in place, they are no longer a company from which I will purchase products. It’s just not worth it!
Back in the 90’s I was doing a recording session and had a problem with their MIDI drum set. I called product support expecting to talk to a tech. After waiting 10 minutes to get through to anyone, I got an operator telling me that I would be assigned a case number and someone would call back within 48 hours. I explained that this was an emegency! I was in a session right now. I had musicians on the clock right now. I needed to speak to a tech RIGHT NOW. I said you MUST HAVE SOME KIND OF PRO DIVISION set up for these kinds of cases. “I’LL PAY YOU!” She gave me the case number and hung up. I lost the session and a small fortune that day. Needless to say I was furious!
2 days later I went into the studio and found a phone message from Yamaha at 9am calling about the drum set (WTF?). How many recording studios are up and running at 9am? They obviously didn’t want to actually catch me in the studio. The message went on to say that as they had not reached me, they would mark this issue “SUCCESSFULLY RESOLVED!” I kid you not!
On some occasion later, I had a chance to talk to a Yamaha rep and I told him about this incident. I told him that I would never buy anything else from them and would advise all of my associates likewise. He told me he heard stories like mine every single day and reported it to his superiors and they were not phased in the least. He was sorry but there was nothing he could do to help.
Needless to say, when I heard that Yamaha had purchased SB, I freaked! Everybody else was so relieved after the Pinacle Disastor that they thought “The Deliver” had come. I warned everybody then that this would happen and was told that I was exagerating and it didn’t make sense for anybody to continue to do business that way. This was a good thing because Yamaha would poor all of their resources into crushing Pro Tools, now that they had a software platform to work with. Yeah, right!
Within 90 days of Yamaha taking ownership, product support at SB went from talking to a tech to talking to those dammned operators and those freaking case numbers. Within 9 months we lost the operators and got that auto-message telling you to submit an email! Product support was officially D.O.A. from that point on. Next major move from Yamaha? The DM2K desk 96 channels at 96K. All of their ads bragged about how well these desk would work with Pro Tools, Logic & Digital Performer! Nuendo wasn’t even mentioned in the ads!
It was this kind of crap that made me totally pass on Nuendo 5. I was interested enough in Nuendo 6 to do the upgrade. But I did so KNOWING that my only form of support would be from fellow users and, after I saw all of the reports about the non support of the CMC series ( Topics tagged cmc-series ), I knew I was right. Anybody who buys anything from Yamaha and/or their subsidiaries does so at there own peril! You had better know up front everything there is to know about a Yamaha product BEFORE YOU PURCHASE IT. Because, once you do, you are totally on your own!