Update: I emailed their customer service as suggested in their reply. They forwarded my email to the store manager, who was part of the initial problem, and said the store would be in touch. They never reached out. I won't do business here again. I can fill my musical needs at Sweetwater or through Reverb without being talked down to and hanged up on. Thanks anyway.
The equipment was flawed, but the service was the real joke. First, it's silly that you can't reserve rentals from a place when renting equipment for important events like weddings, but that's the least of our problems. I set up the PA for rehearsal. I have experience, and I had a friend who runs sound on FaceTime (we knew what we were doing). I was glad I'd paid for the insurance. The speakers were banged up and every piece had missing or broken parts. No big deal if it functioned, but there was no acknowledgement of the equipment's condition at the time of rental. Without insurance, they could've blamed me for the damages and charged for the price of new equipment. There was no power cable for the subwoofer. I called the store and was told "the best we can do is give you a power cable if you come back to the store," so I made the 2-hour round trip. Finally set up, sound was staticky and cutting out and vocals were not playing at all. We worked late into the night and eventually got it working enough. The input on one speaker must've been causing issues because it was better when we used the input of second speaker. The vocals began working, but none of us understood why. We played music before the wedding with vocals, it worked. There was some static during the ceremony, but it wasn't awful. For their first dance, the music cracked and popped, and no vocals. We halted to fix the PA, again. We checked each connection, tried different devices to play the music, swapped cables. We finally used a small speaker someone had in their car, played the music through that speaker, and put the microphone in front of that speaker. It got us by, but it took a lot of troubleshooting mid-wedding, and we should not have had to rig the equipment to get a half-working system.
My mom returned it next day. I suggested she ask for a discount and let them know about the issues before they rent it out again. She called me from the store and put me on with the manager, Hunter, who said they would test the equipment. If it worked, there was nothing he could do. I suggested they keep testing if it worked at first. It worked some times, just not when it counted. They called back 10-15 minutes later. The equipment was working, so the problem must've been us, maybe the device we used to play music or the cable. I re-explained that we'd tried different cables and devices, and I reminded him that it worked sometimes, just not consistently. He said, "well, it's working now, so there's nothing we can do." I asked for another manager, and Hunter said he is the manager. I asked if he had a supervisor and he said there was a store manager, Ryan, who would tell me the same thing. He said "it's your word against mine and I'm the one testing the equipment, so we all know how that's gonna go." I asked when Ryan worked so I could speak with him. Hunter laughed and told me Ryan was there, but I needed to call the store if I wanted to talk to him. He was not going to pass the phone over. I did that. Ryan was clearly annoyed, assured me that the problems we had with the PA were my fault, that they tested it and there was nothing wrong with the equipment. He told me that he had already approved a partial refund because we were upset, but he made sure I knew this was a "customer service refund" because we were unhappy, not a refund-refund, because they hadn't done anything wrong. (The refund they gave barely covered the gas for that round trip for a power cord, which they just didn't think was an issue.)
The entire thing was bizarre and infuriating. I expected a brief conversation about the issues we had, maybe a partial refund for the equipment or at least an apology for not including all the equipment and all of the trouble, and for them to take a look before renting it out again. Instead, they were immediately defensive and treated me like a scam artist-- a little bro club, proud and righteous that they held their ground. It was gross. read more