On being dis-satisfied with purchases
Why is it that every single major purchase I make leaves me feel dis-satisfied and pissed off because the product is broken in some obvious way. Or at least in some way that seems obvious to my overactive critical mind?

Our aging Sony VHS VCR finally broke. And our equally aging non-widescreen Sony TV is embarrassing. So it was time to upgrade the major bit of evening entertainment hardware in the household. So I ventured forth into the minefield that is Black and Silver consumer electronics. As usual I didn't do enough research before picking what looked like a bargain. A nice new 32" Evesham Alqemi SX LCD TV and an Evesham PVR160 hard disk recorder. At UKP600 and UKP150 these look like pretty good value. There's just one catch, we have NTL cable, principally so I can watch motorcycle racing on Eurosport and Motors TV. So a key requirement is that it plays well with NTL cable and I can record a cable channel. So I make a point of asking the salesman, he (and I) look at the box and see that as well as Freeview, the PVR has two Scart inputs and should be able to record from one of them. What I should do is wait for NTL to finally release their HDD competitor for Sky+. But I've been waiting 24 months since the announcement and there's still no sign of it. And lots of complaints about their subsidiary, Telewest's, version. But with Christmas coming up, I can't be without any method of TV time shifting.

The boxes get home, it all goes together, it fires up first time, the manuals aren't too bad. Having a hard disk for recording from a 14 day program guide is super cool. And then the irritations start.

- The TV has a very slight but annoying lip sync problem. I do the research and discover that this is actually normal and caused by the differing digital processing paths between the audio signal and the video signal. You can get super high end home entertainment hardware with adjustable audio delay lines to tweak it out. The IBC held a seminar on "Lip Sync: A lost cause". So everybody, but everybody, is spending large amounts of money on Digital, High Definition, super shiny, giant, flat, wide, video hardware that upsets the part of the brain that focuses on the lips and mouth of people speaking to us, leading to a low grade anxiety while watching. After a while you can't quite work out what's wrong but you know something is.

- Some manufacturer in the far east has come up with an amazingly cheap electronics board that combines two Freeview tuners with a 3.5" hard disk. This gets packaged into lots of slightly different boxes with slightly different logos and sold at an amazingly cheap price. BUT, the designers left out one blatantly obvious feature that every recorder has had since the invention of the Scart plug and that's the ability to record from Line in as well as the internal tuner(s). Yup. The PVR doesn't work with an NTL Cable box. The second SCART socket is Video OUT ONLY for connection to a DVD/VHS recorder for archiving recordings. It should be so trivial to provide this that I can almost imagine that it would be a software upgrade only. And because the boards come from one manufacturer, every single low end HDD recorder is the same. So these things don't work for anyone with cable or satellite. Doh!

- The PVR box has room for a FreeView pay-TV card. But the slot is blanked off. So even if I paid (again) for topup TV to get Eurosport, I still couldn't record it.

- So the PVR goes back for a refund and I walk down to Richer Sounds, hoping for a sensible sales person and a bargain. Hooray, they have an LG DVD recorder and 160Gb HD for only UKP250. It appears to do everything I need. Fingers crossed. Back home it all goes together. Somewhere in the manual it says HDMI out, the TV has HDMI in. I nip down the shops and buy an HDMI cable. Then I look at the back of the box. Arrrggg! The RH188H has the socket. I've got the RH188 which doesn't. Oh, well, everything else seems to work. I don't get the nice 14 day EGP but Videoplus and manual timing works and I've been doing that for years with only a few fuckups.

- I'm still trying to find the optimum way of hooking all the SCARTs and antenna cables together. This should be simple but it's confused because we have an aerial on the roof, a tuner out from the NTL box and three bits of kit each with two SCARTs. The antenna feed for everything needs to come from the aerial to get Freeview on the TV. The SCART interconnect is about trying to avoid picking from 7 Digital inputs every time you switch from TV to Cable to Recorder. And making sure I don't screw up when setting the timer.

- The old Sony TV had speaker output sockets. We had an ancient pair of Celestion Ditton 15 speakers, inherited from my Dad, hooked up. They have a lovely warm sound with great bass. Of course the new TV has numerous audio out sockets but it's all low level. And while the built in speakers are ok, they're a bit weak. There's a bunch of frankly useless effects like an equaliser, bass boost, two speaker Dolby enhancement, mono to fake stereo. So they all get set to flat. The headphone output is independent of the speaker output. And the remote doesn't control it. Plugging in headphones doesn't mute the main speakers. In fact there is no way to mute the main speakers except the big mute switch which is overridden by the volume control. So do I a) take the back off and solder in a speaker out socket. or b) buy the cheapest stereo amp I can find or c) buy a cheap Dolby surround decoder. But wait a minute, the external amp connections will mean yet another remote to control the sound which is different from the two remotes for channel. And why am I even contemplating ripping a brand new box apart and wielding a soldering iron? Am I nuts?

- Somewhere in here I go looking for reviews or anyone who knows what they're talking about. And that's when I'm reminded that Google sucks when looking for anything to do with consumer products. All you get is 30 price comparison engines. And when you do actually find a forum, there's a spectrum of competence from extreme hardware and software hackers reverse engineering the electronics (1%) to vast hordes of amateurs who haven't a clue (99%). And all mingled in with extremely upset customers who've been sold a pup and have had to fight their way through customer support hell (15%).

I guess I must be getting old and turning into the classic grumpy old man. This stuff used to be really easy when there were 4 terrestrial channels, TVs were all the same and so were VHS recorders. Now it's a constant and expensive treadmill of amazing technology that grows in features and drops in price on a 6 month cycle. Except that it's always 10% broken and not exactly what you wanted.

This modern life, eh?

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[ 10-Dec-06 9:18am ] [ ]