Why Is Buying Replacement Parts So Expensive?

A Story of Woe….

As my blog bio outlines I’m a massive fan of Podcasts. I also enjoy streaming games and doing Facebook Live videos. A couple of years ago I bought a mixer to allow me to do this all a bit better. I picked it up from Amazon and I had great fun allowing people to call in and it be broadcast. Due to re-arranging the rooms in my flat, it was ‘decommissioned’ and the Behringer mixer sits on a shelf.

Picture the Scene

If you do check out my live streams or even my YouTube videos you might have seen that I have a peice of ‘art’ that is 3 Atari 2600 carts in a frame. This was a billy-bargain from eBay at about £10 delivered – the games are worth £5 each, I’m sure! It is an MDF frame they are in and quite heavy. One thing it didn’t have was a way of actually hanging it. I went on Amazon and purchased a picture hanging kit and got to work hanging my art on the wall.

All was good in the world.

Danger Danger

After succesfully hanging it, I got onto the important task of cooking dinner. This evening it was chicken fajitas with left-over chicken from a Sunday roast. Super tasty and quick to make. However, this detail isn’t important to the story. What is important is that while eating the lovely meal I heard a crash.

I presumed it was something on the draining board falling off but it turned out that the mounting kit had ripped out of the MDF and the picture had fallen to the floor. Luckily the glass hadn’t broken but I was now left with TWO issues.

1. I had to find another way of fixing the picture to the wall.
2. It had landed on the connector of my mixer’s power supply!

Flat as a Pancake

The connector was borked! Behringer use their own special shaped connector and so I couldn’t just use another power supply. There was no chance of me bending it back into shape and so the only thing for it was to contact Behringer to see whether they have spare parts. The Behringer website does link to their spare part supplier so I put a request through to find out how much this would cost.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The Good

Behringer use Music Tribe to handle their spare parts so when I put in a request I got an email back that they would respond within a day. Not a bad service at all. I liked the fact they emailed me back (an auto-reply) giving a time frame to reply. This made me feel like I’d not just thrown my request into the ether.

It was their quote back that shocked me.

The Bad

£41.78. Forty-One Pounds And Seventy-Eight Pence! I had to re-read it a few times to make sure they hadn’t quoted me for two or something. Over £10 of that was ‘frieght handling’. Royal Mail would probably charge £5 tops to post (insured as well), and no VAT on post so could have saved another £1+ there. £32 for the actual power supply is crazy. There is no way I would be spending £42 on just a power supply for a mixing desk.

To give you an idea, this is about what I paid for it when I purchased it – £55. So for £13 more than Behringer want for a power supply, I can buy a whole new mixer and throw-out the old one. Thats £13 for a new machine with a new warranty.

The Ugly

To be fair, ‘Ugly’ was just to give it a catchy header. What I will do is buy a non-branded power supply from Amazon for £13 and then, when the mixer or PS breaks, replace them with a new one. If Behringer had quoted me £20 for a power supply then I would have happily paid that (not a £10 postage charge!), but seeing as their quote was over double what I wanted to pay, I’ll have to decline their kind offer.

So there we have it

It shouldn’t be this expensive but it was. I’m deciding to use my money to pay less for an un-official power supply and re-use the perfectly good mixer I have rather than buy another mixer. I think this a problem with lots of tech nowadays – its sold at a price and the expectation is you throw it away rather than fix. There isn’t much you can do to fix stuff yourself but where possible, do try to make sure you reuse and fix where you can – lets keep the planet going a little longer.