@tony,
At this stage, we can all see this from the tone of the post that you're extremely upset at us. I tried in the above email to share more details from our point of view and unfortunately it got seen as a way as if we're trying to make excuses to the unfortunate series of event.. :-( That wasn't the intent, that was just to go back and forth so we see the other side. Sharing ideas, comments doesn't always mean trying to find an excuse and walking away from the problem.. Else I wouldn't put my name on this thread to "engage" with the customer. Please understand that I wasn't personally involved in this support back and forth so I'm just trying to follow up the situation and most importantly find a solution. I do take the responsibility as I run miniDSP but please bear with me for a sec here when I say "miniDSP".I wasn't personally involved here, just trying to help.
Without starting into a back and forth that could take forever, I will summarize the situation as:
1) You had a faulty unit. It sucks! Sorry.
2) Our dealer tried to help
3) That fix solve an issue but somehow the system has another issue.
4) Because we can't find any relation between the 2, we simply wanted to see how these are related and if there is something we're missing instead of keeping sending units.. That is just our standard policy and we've been able to solve many issues this way as the unit would be out for few days. To be honest, it has never been an issue in the past and that maybe the reason why our team is surprised. We live we learn.
I'm just getting up to speed here, I will talk to George
@deercreekaudio to see what can be done.
As for the other comments, I do value how we can learn from this exercise indeed! There are 2 examples worth looking at where I really hope/think that we're both reading in between the lines and unfortunately unable to come to an agreement.. I'll try one last time to be of help to see if I can clarify what I mean, what I said.. it's very possible I'll fail but then again, worth a trial! If I were at a bar, I'm sure I'd be able to make my point accross..
- On the trigger cable, we never ignored anything and once again, what I meant is that we learned over time. Going through the valuable back and forth emails, we did learn how that specific USB trigger cable that you are using works (i.e. thanks for you to open that specific 3rd party product). We've never seen one before so simply didn't know.. Every single day we have customers telling us how our gear is interfacing to others, we don't know them all. Talking to the engineers, we learned how it could be an issue. We shared that simple "safety feedback with you to put a hub to protect from surge. That's all..
Would it have been possible in a perfect world to spot that tiny element back then? Sure! We're human we miss some details when troubleshooting remotely these issues... We also only thought of it when we got your motherboard back few weeks later from Deercreek. That's when the engineers thought of it.. Once again, it was just sharing a tip to protect your unit.. Would you mind to maybe share a bit more what would you have expected from our team once we learned that this cable can be an issue? We can learn for future. Every single day we give advise to customers on how to use their system at its best/safest way.
- Roon/Tidal: You're correct that indeed we don't share the details and I guess it's not what everybody wants in this day and age of newsflash... Do you hopefully see our point that it's a chicken and egg situation? If we share but have issues/limitations outside our control and have delays, we're getting it wrong. If we don't share, because we simply do not want people to think we're working on it and have vaporware, we're getting wrong.. Can you imagine if we would have stated "We're working on Tidal Connect", next post interpreted by the community = "MiniDSP will have Tidal connect support" = "Why I don't have Tidal connect on our unit" = "You're lying to us, miniDSP sold us a unit that doesn't support Tidal Connect".. All this time still being under R&D/agreement/delays outside our control... It's a slippery slope.. From experience running miniDSP for years, we feel that it's Best to simply not talk of it, not set expectation.. Do our best to keep plowing, keep pushing free extra features and then surprise the community... But we can understand how maybe it's not a right fit for everybody... We're not sure how to solve this to be honest. We do want to be involved, we do want to hear from community and we do read all feature requests but we don't want vaporware.. Anytime I hear of Roon, it breaks my heart because it's something that I would much rather surprise the community with rather than say "Yes, we're actively working on it as we're indeed are".
As for the feedback on support, we don't like seeing such comments and who really in their right mind would? Following 10years anniversary, we're not sure how we ended up being viewed as such.... :-( We can only say that it's quite at odds with all the work we're doing being the scenes to help our customers with dedicated engineers, support team and management team. Over the past 10years we run miniDSP, we do have a large community, lots of products and lots of happy customers with impressive setup and feedback. I will not hide that the past year has been challenging keeping up everybody happy... We get about 100support tickets a day which we answer within 24~48h max, we all plow through each custom system, engineers are stopping R&D to custom code firmware to solve issue... We battle the elements of supply chain in the mean time meaning we need to custom code new chipset on the fly.. We're growing the support team and a new member will be addressed to more community work starting from Mid August... Once again we're not trying to find an excuse as to why these customers are so unhappy, to be honest I'm a bit surprised at such anger at us but I guess it's hard to make everybody happy and I'd be interested to hear from them directly. They can easily start a support ticket with us with the specific product they have and why our support team wasn't able to help answer their request (support.minidsp.com). It is valuable to us so we can learn here!
Overall, I'm hoping to come to a conclusion for your case so you can enjoy your SHD again!
Tony