When you buy one of your products, we want you to have as much fun as possible making delightful (or not-so-delightful, depending on your style) noises. Customer support is extremely important to us: on occasion, you’ll run into a problem, but we’re always here to help. Sometimes those problems just need some troubleshooting, but on rare occasions, hardware fails and needs to be repaired. 

Recently, we discussed our goals as both a company and a member of the synth community, and realized that we wanted to adjust our warranty policy to better serve you, the customer, and also prevent waste. 

Out with the old warranty, in with the new 

So, what has changed? Previously, our modules all came with a one-year warranty against factory defects for the original owner of a module. That meant that if you bought a module and something was wrong with it we would repair it for free, as long as that repair happened within one year and you were the person who originally bought the module. Past that one-year mark, or for any second-hand modules, repairs cost a fee that varied depending on the module, as well as shipping costs in both directions. 

This is a pretty standard warranty that you’ll see in a variety of industries. However, we decided we wanted to do a bit more. 

So, from here on out, if you own a Noise Engineering module, and something goes wrong with it, we will repair it and send it back to you for free (with two notable exceptions, listed below). We’ll ask you to pay the cost of shipping the module to us, but we will cover the labor, parts, and shipping back to you. 

There are two exceptions to this. First, misuse, modification, and user-inflicted damage: if you, for instance, take a hammer to a module, or decide to take it surfing, or turn it on while the back is sitting on something made of metal, that won’t be covered by the free repair policy. If something like this does happen, get in touch, though: we will still do our best to help, but we may ask you to pay for parts and labor. Just try to keep the hammers and the surfboards away from the synths. 

Second, for legacy modules that aren’t manufactured anymore, we may not be able to get the parts to repair certain things. We do our best to keep parts in stock and our goal is to keep modules up and running for as long as possible, but sometimes parts go off the market and, sadly, there’s nothing we can do when that happens. In fact, that’s why we have had to end-of-life some products.

If you’re curious about anything else, you can read the full warranty terms in any of our user manuals here.

How does it work?

We try to make it easy! All you have to do is send us an email via our Modular Issues contact form to get the ball rolling. On the form, we ask for a clear photo of the back of the module and the serial number. We’ve gotten questions about this requirement, so let us explain! Whenever possible, we try to solve problems without requiring you to send products in. These both help us diagnose the problem. In some cases, we may ask for a simple video. If we can suggest a fix without you needing to ship it to us, everyone wins. In probably a quarter of the cases, we manage fixes without shipping using this method.

If that doesn’t work, we’ll set you up with a repair authorization number, and you can ship the module to us. We try to get most repairs done within a week of receipt (pending part availability). 

Why we’re making this change

The biggest reason that we’re making this change is that we just think it’s a good thing to do. When we buy things ourselves we like to know that the creator has our back, and we want you to have that same feeling. 

The second reason is that keeping modules up and running and out of the electronics recycling pile is better for the world we live in: we discussed in a recent blog post the things we’re working on to reduce our environmental impact and improve wherever we can, and making it easy to repair existing products is another place where we can do that.