Hi All
I found out many years ago that the more you lower your price or do something for free the more likely you are to get abused and treated like an incompetent or worse yet some sort of a crook. Just take a look in society the highest paid (eg Doctors/ lawyers etc) are the most revered in society (hey I have spent $2000 per hour on Lawyers before).
So I get disappointed when customers infer we are somehow incompetent, greedy and worse yet threaten to bad mouth our company on the internet if they do not get their way. I really do not like threats.
We received this complaint a week ago:
So to save this person the time to say nasty things about us on the internet - I will do it for him
Hey there to you.,
This morning I sent the $55 as requested, and mailed the unit off this afternoon.
Now, I have a lot to say about this unit and your company. Whether or not I post this on the net will be determined by the final outcome. 1.) Most companies here in the States when they make a defective product, they repair or replace it free of charge, including shipping. It cost me $55 + $212 to send this unit back to you, almost the cost of a new unit! It is defective and was poorly developed (the SQ portion that is, the QS/RM portion is EXCELLANT!).
2.) Chucky in his report back to us said the problem is that some cartridges only have 10 db of separation. Well that's not my case. I have an Audio Technica AT15, which is rated at 35 db @ 1KHz. I'll have to wait until I get it back to see about this.
3.) He also mentioned that the CBS Labs test records didn't adhere to the SQ equation . I don't know about that, it could be true. BUT...those test records were encoded and recorded by CBS, and if they were wrong, all SQ records were recorded wrong. Not one record I tried decoded,the front channels correctly. When you found this out, you should have tweaked the circuits until it decoded correctly. This "regular/original" versus "vinyl" version is ridiculous!! There was never anything BUT vinyl recorded in SQ! In the seventies, CDs and downloads didn't exist!.
So, in the end, this is what I'm looking for:
1.) a unit that decodes correctly all produced SQ records, including the CBS test records, with LF coming from LF only, and RF from RF only. If the new chip doesn't do that, adjust it until it does! I hope it will be verified before being sent back to me, because I'm not paing #300 again!
2.) Some refund on all the money I've spent on this poorly developed unit.
Rant over (for now).
I replied:
Hello XXXX
I regret the additional cost required for the software update but it is no different to Microsoft going from one version of windows to another and charging for the update. Are you saying that Microsoft should have got it right on their original version of windows back in the 90’s?
The commercial realities of the SQ edition is that it was done as a favour to the QQ forum after many members pleaded us to do so. We sold around 50 sets of the SQ version to QQ members and the original version took us around 16 weeks to develop at a cost of around $40,000. That works out to a software development cost of $800 per customer (plus the hardware). We did it partly as a favour but also we wanted to!
At the time of the original development one obnoxious QQ member was giving us heat that we were not decoding QS “’buy the book” and was implying we were not going to decode SQ “by the book”. Consequently we took great care that our SQ decoder was precise in accordance with the decode mathematics. The unit worked perfectly with properly encoded SQ sources (as supplied by script versions).
All the initial reviews were great and I think universally stated that we did a better job than the Tate, particularly in respect to image stability and transient tonality. A year or so after the initial success we had 3 members state that the Tate was better than ours in front back separation with vinyl sources. Subsequent testing showed this to be correct. We found that any minute difference in magnitude AND PHASE of the left right signal from the Vinyl was the cause. It can be the cartridge or it can be in the recording – as we found with the CBS record with quite large PHASE errors.
We then promised to investigate the problem and offer an update to all those who wanted it. We were delayed for about a year but finally we spent another 3 weeks addressing the issue (costing us $10,000). This is the version we now offer.
Frankly some people will still prefer the original version, I await reviews by some “volunteers”. The price we offer for the update actually does not cover our costs of hardware and packaging/ administration but was kept low – again as a favour.
I do not like threats and so I have posted your email on the QQ forum (unnamed).
Regards
Charles van Dongen
(AKA Chucky)
Please feel free to check up on me via google, you will find I am clean. We have never charged for a repair of any of our products when it was our fault - even years outside the warranty period
There, I feel better now.
Regards
Chucky
