Out With The Old

One of the responsibilities included in managing all the audio and AV gear for an organization is the power to make decisions about what gear to buy and what gear to get rid of. Now, that’s not to say I could just whip out the Master Card and buy a thirty-box line array without any approval. That would be a very unwise choice indeed.
Let’s say though I identify a need for a couple more powered speakers and stands. I can pretty much decide what to buy and initiate the buying process. Being an entity of the state government, this process can be arduous and time consuming but for the most part we get what we asked for as long as it’s within reason and you’re good enough at justification.
This post isn’t about the shiny new gear though; it’s about the other end of the spectrum.

If you have a facility or sound company for long enough, you will undoubtedly have some stuff on shelves in dark corners of your storage rooms that isn’t getting used and probably isn’t going to get used ever again.
If you picture that Beheringer compressor that has one bad channel, you’re on the right track. Here’s a piece of gear that’s not technically worthless (simmer down you guys, I know you don’t like this brand in the first place). It has a working channel, right? But it’s not worthy of your repair budget dollars because of it’s less than stellar lineage and who’s ever going to rack that piece again knowing that one channel is bad? So it sits on the shelf with board tape saying “Left channel NFG” in sharpie stuck to the face. This unit could stay on my shelf for YEARS. It’s silently hoping for the unlikely event to come along where I need “just one more channel of compression”. It’s never going to happen though because we’ve got a stack of dbx 160s sitting right next to it on the shelf.

Given some time, these items can really pile-up. All it takes is an upgrade project or two and you could have a first class yard sale brewing in your back room. Consider the new mixer I’m about to install. How many delays, compressors, and gates will it replace in our control room? Just about all of them, I guess. No real need for the type of commonplace dynamics we have up there when all their functions are included in the mixer, right? Heck, the mixer out guns them ten times over. I could see keeping some of those pieces if they were really special, but our equipment is pretty run of the mill so off to the storage shelves they will go.

Just like buying stuff, the state has procedures to follow for disposing of its property. These too can be tedious and time consuming. For the last few years we’ve been selling all of our old stuff on a web auction site for government surplus property. On these sites you can find pretty much anything you’re interested in but it’s likely to be broken, missing pieces, quite lightly described, and very poorly photographed.
Recently, after much hand wringing, loads of paperwork and prodding of the bureaucracy, we put lots of stuff online. Even harder than working through the sale process though was the process of deciding to actually let go of some of the good stuff. I’m a packrat at heart so it’s not in my nature to let anything go that I think I might need. I also have trouble selling anything that I think is “good” for much less than what I think is a fair price. We decided to sell some pretty nice White and KT EQs, a perfectly good delay, and some other pieces that I felt I’d like to have for myself. We weren’t using those units though so they had to go.
Those good things went together in a fairly large lot of audio and AV related stuff including 16 amplifiers, an overhead projector and a slide projector. The lot sold for only a few hundred dollars. We could have done better if we’d sold the things individually on an audio related site or even Ebay but this is the process and it’s just the way it’s done. Somebody got a bunch of stuff for not a lot of money.
I hope that those EQs will end up in the hands of somebody who needs them and will use them again. They’re meant to be used. They deserve better then the shelf in my office.

Now that we've had our big yard sale, I guess it's time to start the new pile. I need to spend more time on the internet so I can find some new products that we "just gotta have". There's some extra space i nthe storage room now, ya know?