Electronic Updates

I thought I would follow up on a few issues I had with some electronics for my home theater.  I'm sure not too many care, but since I posted about the problems earlier, I thought I would close things off.

I had posted earlier about my subwoofer dying and well, it turns out getting it fixed wasn't that big of a deal.  It's a Velodyne HGS10, which I bought back in 1999.  It's since gone out of production, but a simple call to Velodyne, filling out a form and sending it via email and there you go, an RMA was issued.  I shipped off the defective subwoofer (the electronic guts only) and they promptly shipped back a replacement, after a rather substantial charge on my credit card, but certainly less than a new subwoofer.  I expected as much...no warranty lasts 9 years.  When it arrived, I put it all back together and voila, back in business.  The whole endeavor took less than two weeks.

Next, some of you know that I received a Roku Netflix player for Christmas.  Unfortunately, it was Dead on Arrival.  On Christmas day I began the email exchanges with their tech support, jumping through the basic troubleshooting hoops...yes, I tried another electrical outlet and yes I tried resetting the device, and finally, two weeks later, they ask for an address to ship a new device to.  I wait a few days...no response, so I prod them via email.  Two days later they inform me they've processed my replacement and are shipping it to me.  Well, I received it today, plugged it in and this one is alive and kicking.  The whole process took a little over three weeks and they included a return mailer for the defective device.

With all the horror stories you hear and read about customer service, both of these were rather pleasant and relatively easy to deal with.  But I suppose no one writes or rants about good customer service experiences, do they.