Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler KEF has lost its collective mind

I have talked to three guys that I know who have been in the retail electronics industry for several years all working for mid-high end retailers and they all told me similar things in that in all their years in the business, they have never seen a situation where it is so hard to get inventory, alot having to do with Covid-19 and lines of distribution that have become quite unpredictable. Of course, most of this stuff if not made in the Far East somewhere, at minimum, that is from where all the internal parts are sourced for pretty well any product regardless of price.

I was looking around for a Yamaha CX-A5200 Pre-Pro that I had given up until I made one last call to a retailer that out of shear luck just had two delivered to the store. It seems the stores are getting the sales(and pre-orders) but they can't guarantee any sort of firm delivery on anything of any consequence.

As much as I love hardware, working in software has eliminated a lot of complexity from my professional life. Supply chains, manufacturing quality, and certification/compliance squeeze every ounce of life out of a hardware engineer. It's not because these things are hard. It's because they are darned near impossible because the rules of the game are never adequately defined and always keep changing.