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Someone requested these so…

Since I’ve replaced my home theater receiver I’ve begun thinking about getting some new surround speakers. I found a really interesting article comparing dipole surrounds to monopole surrounds. This and some other evidence has convinced me that I should be looking there for my surrounds.

I also began thinking quite a bit about speaker placement. My seating is a large sectional couch if you’re sitting on the center of the couch facing the screen the couch lines the back wall, and the left wall, and the right wall is completely open.

I also noticed that most dipole speakers recommend placment at 5-7ft above the floor… This got me thinking because at a larger height I would gain a much better sound scape with people more equi-distant from the speakers instead of sitting right next to one with another 10ft away.

I’m still worried about spacing from the wall, and particularly the open wall… I’ve considered both putting up a small partition wall to help enclose the area as well as give me a good speaker mounting location as well as placing the speakers up higher and angling them down slightly like they do in the theaters… though I’m not sure if this would disrupt the wall reflexting properties of most dipole speakers.

I know some of you out there are really into audio, if you have any advice… I’m all ears…

So getting a replacement for my receiver wasn’t nearly as easy as it should have been.

I was torn between ordering a Denon AVR-2809 from Dakmart.com or ordering a Marantz SR6003 from AC4L.com. I bought my last receiver from AC4L.com as well as several other products and I’ve always pleased with their support. UnfortunatelyDakmart was showing that the Denon was in stock and AC4L was showing that the Marantz was out of stock. Wanting to get back up and running quickly I decided to buy the Denon.

I ordered the Denon on a Wednesday Morning, later that evening  I received notification from AC4L that the Marantz was in stock… oh wel the money had already been spent.

That Friday I was a bit upset that I hadn’t received a shipment notification on the receiver, afterall I wanted it quickly and if it hadn’t shipped yet then that wasn’t very good considering I spent over $60 to ship this thing. I called Dakmart Friday afternoon and was told that it had NOT shipped because IT WAS NOT IN STOCK… WTF… apparently their website doesn’t accurately protray their invintory… but in place of a Denon AVR-2809 they could send me a Denon AVR-989… it’s essentially the same exact model but the 2809 is made for “custom installs” by home theater pros and the 989 is for big box consumer stores. the 2809 has some extra programability and has a realy nice remot with an LCD as well as a 2nd remote for a 2nd audio zone, while the 989 has some POS remote… the price is exactly the same and I’m told that they can ship it out that day… OK FINE send me the downgraded model.

After agreeing to this I get put on hold then disconnected I call back but there is no answer, I get no shipping confirmation, and I call back on Saturday and again no answer. I call Monday morning and am told that it DID ship and they would send me the tracking number…

I don’t get the tracking umber until 2 days later and the receiver is due to arrive the day before xmas. Great I can spend that day setting it up and then start enjoying it after xmas.

I’m sick on xmas eve day and end up spending it on the couch waiting for the package (which requires a signature BTW). At about 3pm I hear the door open and some banging I get up to find 2 UPS guys ROLLING the box with the receiver in through the door to my house… no knocking no door bell, one of them looks at the other says “see I told you you should have rang the doorbell”. The other one has to GO BACK TO THE TRUCK to get the signature pad because they were apparently planning on just leaving it there without getting a signature.

I let it sit in the kitchen because I’m too run down to set it up or even open the package.

The day after xmas I completely tear out all of the device in my home theater and rewire EVERYTHING, this takes me several hours and I didn’t even finish hooking everything into the new receiver or turning it on. The day after that I finish hooking it up but Brandon is stopping by to visit for a few days and he arrives just when I finish plugging things in but haven’t got a chance to turn it on yet.

A little later I turn it on, I need to configure the inputs and it takes me a half hour of digging through the manual to figure out how to even get the on screen display to come up. A few hours later after programming everything and re-arranging a few plugs in the back I get it up and running. We pop on Left4 Dead… after about 20 minutes the audio cuts out and I just hear BUZZZZZZ from the speakers.

I turn off the receiver look throught the manual to figure out if something is setup wrong or what could have happened… after turning the receiver back on it seems to work again… for another 20 minutes befor the audio drops and it starts to buzz…

The receiver came with a sheet of paper that says “If you experience issues with this product DO NOT contact your retailer, call Denon directly at…” so the next morning I call Denon I’m on hold for 45 minutes according to the call timer on my cell phone. I finally get someone and they speakEnglish to boot! Unfortunately this fellow has a vocabularly of two words: “um” and “hmm” which he uses repeatedly for litterally 2 minutes before telling me that I had to return it. I remind him of the piece of paper that came witht he receiver and the fact that I ordered it from an online retailer and returning it would be difficult. he doesn’t seem to care and tells me that I can try resetting the digital procesor but if that doesn’t work I need to return it.

I get off the phone and reset the digital processor per his instruction, this of course undoes the hours worth of setup that I had done the day before, I quickly run through the setup procedure in about 30 minutes just getting it far enought to run with the 360 and PS3. I go to play something and again… audio dies and it buzzes… I call dakmart there’s no answer so I leave a message

The next day I haven’t received a call back from dakmart so that afternoon I call them they answer and after asking my name the guy on the phone says “oh yeah I got a call from you!” Well gee then why the F*** didn’t you cal me back? I explain the problem and then he tells me the unit is obviously DOA so he’ll just send an email to Denon tell them they need to replace my unit… WTF so I’m not even returning it to the retailer I’m returning it to Denon but they needed the retailer to tell them that. To make maters worse this guy CCs me on the email he sent to Denon and despite the detail I gave him including which inputs I was using which modes the receiver was set to he pretty much just wrote denon “customer experiences buzzing”.

I get a shipping label with ZERO detail as to how they’d want me to box it, which items need to be included or even an RMA number. I call dakmart the next day and I’m told to just put it back in the box I got it in and I don’t need to include anything else. Just to be on the safe side I placed a dot with a sharpie on the back of the unit so I could tell if I got the same one back, I wrote down the tracking number and the serial number and I typed up a lengthy description of the problem and taped it to the top of the unit to ensure that they KNOW the full extent of the problem.

Of course at this point it’s new years day and everything is closed so I have to wait another day before I can actually ship it out…

When I drop it off at Staple’s UPS store the woman takes out a marker and starts scribbling over the non-shipping labels on the box. I ask why and she informs me that this is VITAL because it will screw up UPS if there are other labels present. Funny considering that these labels were on the box from the manufacturer and they shipped me this unit via ups just days earlier… whatever. I look at the chart they have on the counter and it says that it should only take 2 days to get to it’s destination of New Jersy. Thinking to myself I recall Dakmart telling me that it would be a 2 day turn around at the repair facility so that means 6 business days total to ship out get fixed and ship back. it sucks but it could be worse I guess.

Two days  later I go to UPS’s website to see if it arrived… it hasn’t instead it shows that the packag made it to Massachusettes and then was “misrouted” (fat lot of good scribbling out those extra labels did) It didn’t tell me where it was misrouted to only that it would be an extra FIVE DAYS before it reached it’s destination… Goody. Keeping track online thankfully it only took an extra 3 days to get there.

2 days after that again no word of a return tracking number or a message as to whether the problem had been fixed or not. I called Denon to get the Status and they ask me for an RMA number… I tell them that I never got one and they tell me that’s impossible… I check my emails just to be sure and NOPE never got one. I tell them that they’re sending the unit back to me directly so they should have my name in the system, no? She then tells me that I can give her the Serial number if I have it so I give her that and she tells me it’s an invalid number… Which seems dumb to me because I pulled it right off the back of the unit and it even matches the number in my email receipt. She then asks where I bought it an I tell her Dakmart. She asks who I spoke to there and I told her “Patrick something or other”… under her breath I hear her say “f*cking Patrick”… apparently he neglects to get RMA numbers all the time… I’m told I have to get a number from him and that Denon can’t do anything to help me.

I call Dakmart and Patrick recognizes my voice (Have I really talked to him that much at this point?) I tell him that I still don’t have my receiver and wanted to know the repair status… he seems surprised so he says he’ll get a hold of Denon and get me a return shipping number. He just emails them with my name… nothing else and tells them to send me a status update or a tracking number.

I get ZERO response from Denon and the next day after that the Receiver arrives back at my house. I wasn’t home but Jamie told me that she saw UPS arrive and went to answer the door. By the time she got to the door they had thrown the box in a snow pile next to the door and just left, no knock, no door bell, no signature (which was again… required). We filed a complaint with UPS.

Opening the box the receiver has the same serial number and the dot I placed on it… and there is NO paperwork at all in the box indicating that they had done any work or even tested the thing.

I hook it back up, setup all the inputs again, and try it out… it seems to beo working.

After a few days of testing I’m confident that it DID actually get fixed because it hasn’t given me any problems since.

In the future I don’t think I will ever buy another product from Denon or Dakmart.com I realize that Denon and Maranz are owned by the same parent company but I NEVER had these kinds of problems and lack of communication when dealing with Marantz and AC4L.com.  A while back when I had bought a Marantz CD changer that was damaged in shipping they kept me informed and dealt with the problem promptly and responsably.

And I’m glad I have a harmony remote to replace the total POS that came with the 989…

So Wednesday night my desktop locked up, which was quite unusual, then it was running slow so I shut it down and it never came back up. It wasn’t until Thursday night that I was able to determine that the Windows Partition of my primary hard drive had crashed. Somehow the formatting had become currupted such that the PC could see the drive but had no idea what was on it, or how things were stored.

My brother had dropped off his PC, which wasn’t working right, so I spent time fixing his (which turned out to be driver incompatability issues… this is the third time this year where I’ve seen windows update upgrade drivers to new versions that don’t work… yay). Once that was squared away I got to work on building another PC from scratch so that I could not only get back online but use it as a tool to help recover (or at least determine the extent of damage to) my crashed hard drive.

I spent most of my day on Saturday working on this… Saturday night however my Marantz SR6200 decided to catch fire… this was turning out to be an expensive weekend. Thankfully shortly after the fire I was able to finish diagnostics on the crahsed hard drive and repaired the borked formatting… 

Saturday night this is how my office looked:

From left to right: an Xbox I just finished fixing, my post fire SR6200, the PC I threw together, and my desktop with it’s hard drives pulled out the side.

The desktop is running well enough to get my files backedup but in general it’s acting like it’s got brain damage, some programs just flat out wont run, others will run for a while and then just stop working, and it’s a whole lot slower than it was before. I’ve got everything backed up now and a new hard drive on order. In the mean time I’m using the piece-built PC, it’s only a P3 700MHz but it gets the job done.

While finding the source of the fire in the Marantz wasn’t easy, it became pretty clear once I unbolted the amplifier board…

It looks like a major transistor failed. The part was an SAP16 NPN 1413 Darlington transistor made by Sanken Electric. I found replacements online for $2 a piece. Hopefully nothing else was damaged and the receiver will be back up and running with a fresh replacement.

Even if I do get it running again I’ll probably just sell it and buy a new Receiver. I’ve been shopping around online and a comparable replacement is in the realm of $1200 new… that’s with similar power and audio quality in addition to new features like support for HDMI 1.3a and HD audio formats.

I’m looking heavily at the Marantz SR6003 or SR7002 to replace this receiver, if anyone has any suggestions let me know.

I was given the wonderful opportunity to hold a give away for collection of SteelBook cased copies of Sukiyaki Western Django. The contest is being held on my site CollectorsEdition.org.

If you’re not familiar with Sukiyaki Western Django then you should hit up the IMDB page for it as well as the trailer. It’s a spaghetti western with a nearly all Japanese cast Japanese writer/director Takashi Miike. It also stars Quinten Tarrentino and as an added twist it’s completely English language (no dubs, no subs). If you liked Kill Bill or Spaghetti Westerns you’ll probably love this film.

So check it out and sign up on Collector’s Edition for a chance to win a really nice SteelBook collectors set on release day.