P7100 Audio Quality

[ElroyJetson]

Sad but true.

Motorola's audio quality for their public safety radios has always been the best they can
build into a radio. And they just keep getting better. Their speakers are custom designed and
built specifically for the application. The GE (whatever brand they're called today) radios
have always relied on off-the-shelf speakers, and while that's good for saving money,
only the M-PD and M-PA had remarkably good audio quality and I attribute that mostly to
the very solid cast metal housings they were mounted securely into. Plus, those speakers
were big enough, too.

I really hate the speakers in LPEs. Tiny little tinny sounding pieces of crap!

Elroy

 

[dgower]

Tape. Great. We paid a helluva lot more than $1800 apiece and tape helps it work better.

Oh boy.........

 

[ElroyJetson]

It's the M/A-Com way. Pay a lot, don't get your money's worth.

Motorola may rape you on radio prices, but what you get is seriously though out...maybe not always WELL though out, but they DID put a lot of thought into it.


Elroy

 

[EngineerZ]

It's the M/A-Com way. Pay a lot, don't get your money's worth.

Motorola may rape you on radio prices, but what you get is seriously though out...maybe not always WELL though out, but they DID put a lot of thought into it.


Elroy

Replace Motorola with M/A-COM and "radio" with "infrastructure" in that statement and it would still be true.

Motorola has almost always beat M/A-Com hands down on terminal equipment. However on the flip side, M/A-Com's infrastructure (repeaters and network) is usually superior to what has Motorola produced. Which vendor an end user chooses often hinges on the aspect of the system those making the choice focus on. The "dream" radio system for many system admin folks would be Motorola mobiles and portables running on M/A-COM infrastructure. Back "in the day" you would see a lot of systems with conventional Motorola mobiles and portables running on GE repeaters... Perhaps P25 will get us back there someday, but it still has quite a way to go.

The point is that the choice of system vendor does not solely lie in the mobiles and portables; other considerations come into play...

--z

 

[ElroyJetson]

I was going to say...with P25, that's possible. But imagine trying to work out a dual tiered
contract with the two competitors for the same system at the same time. It'd be
frightening to just be in the room with them.


Elroy

 

[Drummadude]

I've used both, and I prefer the quality of the P7100. I'm not exactly familiar with the timeline of the different models of the MRK, but the one I had to use while the P7100 was in the shop (for volume problems) had really groggy sounding audio.

On that note, has anyone experienced volume difficulties (going up and down and being unreliable) with the P7100? I volunteer for the school police so it is a used and abused radio, but after about two weeks at a radio shop, the radio was working fine again.

 

[JungleJim]

On that note, has anyone experienced volume difficulties (going up and down and being unreliable) with the P7100? I volunteer for the school police so it is a used and abused radio, but after about two weeks at a radio shop, the radio was working fine again.

Early models of the radio had a problem where the nuts holding the volume and selector switch would work loose. The switches would wobble and either short intermittently or tear the flex between them. Macom now puts loctite on them and all replacement switch assemblies come with nuts that have the loctite pre-applied.