Yeah, it's highly annoying to have to act like that just to get decent customer service. And with your NAS and Squeezebox breaking down - you'd be tempted to think you're haunted or something!

Good customer service still exists though. Oppo for instance is renowned for it.

I do hope your troubles will be over soon!

Quoting SpikyCactus:

Quote:
This won’t really matter to anyone here, but I feel the need to share the information anyway.

I use an Onkyo TX-NR807 amp.  I bought it in January 2010.  In January 2012 it broke down.  Fortunately it got fixed pretty quickly.  In January this year it broke down again, with exactly the same fault.  This time it wasn’t fixed quickly.

Last week I rang up the crappy repair company, (Genserve, Onkyo’s official repair company in the UK).  Not my first call to it.  Fed up with it abysmal service, I used my ‘really, really, really pissed off customer who knows where you live and will kidnap your babies and torture and kill them if you don’t bloody get it fixed soon' persona, to get some information out of them.  Apparently the replacement part was ordered from Germany but if it’s not in stock there it has to come from Japan.  The guy I spoke to offered to send an e-mail to see where things had got to; wow, I’m sure that scared the poo out of them.  I also phoned up Onkyo and gave it a load a grief about its shoddy amplifier design.  What a lot of bollocks that all turned out to be, as strangely I got a phone call less than 48 hours later to tell me it had been fixed.  I got it back last Friday.  Why do I have to pretend to be a murderous psycho to get anything sorted these days?

In retaliation, both my NAS drive and Squeezebox have now broken down....technology! 

I understand your pain  and am reminded of this piece of audio from about ten years ago ...

While I understand how this sort of thing happens a lot, often it's not the repairers fault. However in your instance it should have been obvious because it's a repetitive fault and should have been fixed quickly - and parts should not have been in short supply (which I believe is the reason for your delay) because the way you describe the fault, it was a common one.

However, repairers often get the short end of the stick when usually it's not really all their fault. Repairers make their money repairing things and the quicker they get them out the door the more money they make. Repeat repairs of common faults are bread and butter - usually because they will have a time charged on these (in cases of warranty), and if it's common it becomes quicker to repair (as you don't have to fault find). Repairers like these type of repairs because they generally can fix them in a shorter time period then they charge for - it makes up for others where they have to spend ages trying to trace the fault and not being able to charge for it as it's not cost effective.

I have a close friend who is a professional repairer, of even higher spec stuff then we use in our home entertainment systems. I know just how it works, and the worst thing now is that most stuff is made in china and they absolutely the worst at providing circuit diagrams, spare parts or anything to do with fixing a faulty unit. Even when a circuit diagram is supplied it's often wrong, or the chinese have changed it in later production runs because they found cheaper components that they believe they could put in the unit with apparently no change to performance (yeah.. right..). China is an absolute nightmare, if you don't buy from a brand that has strict controls over their production (if in China) you will run into trouble. I know a lot of equipment importers who know use the 'throw it away rule'. By this I mean - lets make it simple just for an example. They order/receive 100 units from china, they then consider the shipment as 80% (maybe 90 if they stretch it). What I mean by this is that they work on the basis they got 80 and work all their pricing models on 80 because they know 20 of them are going to fail and they know trying to fix those 20 via their authorised repairers is going to be a nightmare, so they basically just replace the faulty one with a brand new unit. In this way they don't suffer financial loss (unless >20 screw up), and they don't have the immense hassles trying to get circuits or parts etc out of china.

Hmm rambled on a bit too much I think :-)

Yep they build it into the cost. You also have to remember that getting stuff made in china is way cheaper then anywhere else, so the extra cost isn't a big thing.
And who's to say what the company's mark up is? Especially when it gets into wholesaler and retailer channels as well. You may think it's bad to add on the manufacturing cost, but how much do they then mark up, 50% 100% along the line?. That in itself is a bigger egg then the extra to cover manufacture.

Haven't you noticed that in the last 5 years or so there's a lot of "brands" out there that you never heard of before, and actually, a number of those brands have again disappeared? These are the imports that failed to think on the 'replace it rather then repair it' idea and ran into a lot of trouble trying to cover warranty repairs.