Sound By Design

Initial response and promises were all pretty good and the installation began pretty quickly and smoothly. After that is when it all fell apart. During the installation I have an iPod dock that was set up to play through in ceiling speakers in the house. When I requested that it also be available on my patio, the installer started to say "that would be easy, no prob at all...." when the owner jumped in and essentially said, "well, we can do that, but it's an additional charge". I had 2 pairs of speakers moved from two ceiling locations to two others. I asked that they just get 2 pairs of "dummy" covers to block the holes left in the ceiling, but they claimed it was an odd size and never did it, leaving 4 holes in my ceiling. I recently had a different company come in to essentially redo my entire system and they put "dummy" covers in immediately like it was no problem. After a massive installation like that, there are always going to be "tweaks" that need to take place to get the sound correct, but within about 2 weeks after the install, the subwoofer wasn't responding at all...period. I called to let them know, but they wanted to charge me a service call fee to even come look at it and even argued about it. Customer service is abysmal, at best. All my devices were placed in a rack mount due to the volume of items necessary. As you could imagine, there are tons of wires involved in such an installation. behind the rack, the wires were going everywhere...there was nothing orderly, neat, nor tidy about it. It literally looked like one of my children hooked it all up themselves. My system supposedly needed to have 2 controllers (I later discovered that 1 would have sufficed.), and one of them went bad within the warranty period. I called and they came out and said that since it's under warranty, it wouldn't cost anything and replaced it. Almost a year later, I had a bluray player go out that needed to be replaced and I texted the owner to see what it would take to switch it out. He told me that when I paid my overdue invoice that they would come take a look. I NEVER received an invoice from them for anything, yet he claimed that they sent it twice (not to mention I was told it wouldn't cost anything. They were literally there maybe 30 minutes). I literally live 2 blocks from their store and there's no possible way that they don't have my correct address. I told him that if I owed any money (I didn't), that I'd be more than happy to pay it, but that if paying up front was intended to be punitive, then I wasn't interested. That was 7 months ago and I've yet to hear from them at all. They are a classic example of overpromise and underperform in every sense of the expression. I know of at least 2-3 others who previously used Sound by Design who will never use them again either. I'd steer clear at all costs. (In my case, that was about $5,000)