The number of times your solutions to my questions have helped me and others certainly qualifies you as an expert. Since I know Design4U... let me clarify a few things...
The comments are based on a dislike for AVADs business practices (namely D2B) which we all thoroughly trashed in an earlier forum. We, as a collective, pretty much determined that support for AVAD makes them stronger (duh) but that they took the money we've supported them with and used it to directly compete with us unless we paid money to join their club. The custom builders we have spent so much time courting and changing the philosophies of are now being solicited by someone who is using part of my dollar to print up the solicitation. Sorry, I know its capitalism, business, the way it is, etc. but it chaps my ass and makes me turn my support elsewhere while making sure that a place like this... frequented by professionals all over the world... gets my opinion blared out.
Couple this with the thing that we all do vent about often... bad wiring jobs that we have to fix. Heres a real scenario we dealt with. Old customer... did his old house. Builder... building beautiful new 1.7 million dollar spec homes. We solicit builder to do wiring correctly. He has us do one lone house... loves it... helps him sell the house. Brings Sparky in who learns how to wire subsequent houses based on our design and then bids it for no profit while using AVAD cable.
We know where to get cheap cable but we like to bid with Tributaries... we feel its a hell of a lot better. Tributaries priced cable puts us upside down if we want to come close to sparky's bid. Design4U figured this cable was a way to get these houses wired with at least some degree of Cat6 and cheap RG6QS but then got mad when I informed him that Pro-Connect was owned by AVAD. The thread started was actually to divert people from buying that cable when trying to compete with sparkomatic Eddie... to use Anixter or something else besides that.
My story ends with old customer selling old house and buying new spec home from builder that was wired by low bid electrician. Turns out Cat6 isn't even in there and there ain't no CAt5e run with the volume controls which at this point relegates us to Matrix Audio systems or rip down of venetian plaster (the former being the less expensive option). We want these spec homes because we've had a rather successful rate of conversion when the house sells that we've wired. In the $300,000 market... we don't really care... those are busy work and turn us a few dollars of profit while not having to use Impaqt's line "sorry guys no work this week". The big specs are where we want in though. Chasing the f---d up wiring in houses drops labor efficiency. With gear so hammered out there (read that clients... the current state of electronics pricing is good for you! Don't beat us up any more!), labor and service are where the money is made (again clients... please read... we HAVE to make money somewhere or we won't stay around to service the systems you've bought from us!).
Anyway... it's a semi sunny Sunday and a rare day off... weather too good to compute any more.
