Saturday, December 08 2007, 11:45 AM

The saga with my receiver is over. Circuit City finally decided to give me a new receiver. This was after yet another trip back to their repair facility (its fourth total). I got lucky and had one of the Circuit City folks on my side. I dealt with the same guy on my previous three trips in there, so he was quite familiar with my issue. This meant he was as confused as I am when he brought my old receiver up to me at the customer service desk and it had a "cancelled" sticker on it, indicating that the repair order was cancelled at the repair facility. Apparently they couldn't find the defect. I have to wonder exactly how they tested it, because it was clear as day to me. Attach a video device to a S-Video input, attach display to S-Video monitor out. Observe broken picture. Done.

Anyway, the Circuit City guy agreed that it was pretty shitty that they couldn't find my problem, so he said that if I could demonstrate the issue to a tech there, he would honor the replacement clause of the service plan I bought for the thing. He grabbed one of the senior associate types (who was also very cool), and I showed the issue to him. He agreed that a receiver shouldn't do that, so a new receiver was mine. The replacement plan gave me a $500 store credit, so I got the newest Onkyo receiver model in the same vein as my previous model (TX-SR605), which was $499. This one has a few more goodies like HDMI support, which is cool. I ended up getting the replacement plan on that one as well, since having to go through this whole deal without it would have sucked even more.

frustrations onkyo-tx-sr603 onkyo-tx-sr605

Tuesday, November 06 2007, 2:26 PM

So, in an eerie repeat of what happened approximately 9 months ago, my receiver decided to die. It died in the exact same fashion as it did previously, with all S-Video related video channels going south. I'm really getting tired of this crap. I have all of my Home Theater crap running through one of those overly expensive Monster surge supressing and line conditioning power strips, so I can't really believe that my stuff keeps dying due to bad power. Whatever it is, it's pissing me off.

I took it into Circuit City today to get it fixed. This is the third time that it's been taken in and subsequently sent off to their repair centers for the exact same issue. I told the lady at the desk that I wanted a replacement, and as expected, she said that she couldn't do that without receiving a notification from the repair center that it was beyond repair. Talk about crap.

Does anyone know if there is some sort of lemon law that covers stuff like this?

frustrations onkyo-tx-sr603

Saturday, April 21 2007, 4:30 AM

The past few days have been a rollercoaster ride of hardware gains and losses. The first involved my web server. On wednesday I decided to upgrade the operating system on the box to the newly released CentOS 5, which supports Xen natively. I brought in a seperate machine to handle the Xen environments so I could perform the upgrade at my own pace. I was successful in getting everything moved over, and the OS upgrade went flawlessly. The issues arose when I tried to insert an IDE card to get around a nagging problem with DMA on my hard drives. Well, that didn't go so well. The case in that machine is huge, and the IDE cables just weren't long enough to reach the IDE card. So, I decided to put everything back te way it was and to deal with it. Well, the machine had different plans. When I put everything back together, the machine wouldn't boot. The diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard indicated a problem with the CPUs, and it wouldn't boot. It remains in that state.

I was pretty despondent over the breakdown, but I decided not to let the hardware I had go to waste. I looked on eBay, and found a server of similar vintage and capability, in 2U rack mount form. It has dual Pentium III 1.4GHz processors, a gigabyte of RAM, and six 18.2GB SCSI drives. It has the same RAID card that my existing server has, so I'll be able to make a nice somewhat-large RAID5 array. I'll have the two 18.2GB drives from my dead server as spares, and the 2GB of RAM from the original server will combine nicely with the 1GB of RAM from the new server. This gem came pretty cheap too... I won it for the paltry sum of $162.50. It should be here monday. Yay for me!

Not too long before I won the auction, I got a call from Circuit City saying that my receiver was ready for pickup. Since they actually ordered parts to fix it, I had confidence that it would finally be fixed. It was. Finally. Everything's hooked back up again, and I'm pretty happy. It's nice to have everything back the way it was.

ebay frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 xen

Tuesday, March 13 2007, 3:39 PM

The ending days of last week were a total pain for me. The reason is something that I would have never thought to be much of a pain for anyone - daylight savings time. I don't know if everyone was aware of the problems associated with the change, or that there was a change at all, but it was certainly a major annoyance for me. When George Dubyah moved the daylight savings time changeover up three weeks, that mandated that just about every computer in the land needed to be updated with new timekeeping parameters.

Lets just say that the software automated updates didn't work out as well as one might have hoped. We manage an entire fleet of linux environments at work (they number in the thousands), and nearly one quarter of them needed work to ensure that they changed over properly. Most of these issues resolved around stale /etc/localtime files. While all of the information in /usr/share/zoneinfo was correct and reflected the new DST changes, /etc/localtime was wrong, and that's what the system bases its timezone conversions on. That meant a lot of work to isolate and fix all the problem machines. We got it hammered out though, with much loss of sleep and overtime. It shouldn't have occured that way though.

It doesn't look like the saga of my broken receiver will end soon either. I called up to circuit city late last week, and inquired about the repair effort. They stated that it had just come back from the repair facility that day, and was available for pickup. When I went to pick it up, I was presented with a concept that was strange to me - the receiver wasn't broken. Not according to Circuit City's repair facility anyway. They gave it a clean bill of health, which didn't sit well with me. I know it was broken when it left my house.

I asked that one of their techs there assist me in running a few tests to make sure it was functioning properly. He grabbed one of their display model TVs and a DVD player, and some cabling. We hooked it up with what we had (using the composite input/oupts), and everything seemed to work fine, except the on-screen setup menu. I thought that was strange, but was in a hurry to head into work to continue dealing with the DST problems. The tech assured me that I could bring it back in if it was still broken.

Well, it was. My fatigue and lack of motivation kept me from testing things out fully until yesterday. When I first sent it in, I just noticed that things weren't working properly, and that I could hack around the issues by changing the input/output path through the receiver. I thought the repair techs would perform more testing to localize the issue, but it would seem that I was wrong. I spent a half hour or so mapping out the various input paths I used, and what the picture looked like on the various output paths. In all the various combinations, it seemed as though there was one common issue - S-Video. Nothing relating to S-Video works. All of the component and composite video works fine. Knowing that, it would seem feasible that the internal setup menu is somehow driven by an SVideo feed as well.

I took the receiver back in yesterday and provided a nice printed copy of my notes that I had taken, which outline exactly what works and what does not. If it comes back as OK after this, I'll be quite upset.

frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 work

Monday, February 26 2007, 12:41 PM

I'm totally digging my new phone. I haven't done much in the way of software downloads for it, but I'll get there eventually. I did install PocketPuTTY, so I'm SSH-enabled wherever I can get the data service or a wifi-connection. I'm also quite pleased that HTC/Audiovox decided to use standardized plugs with the phone, and that Canon did the same with my new camera. They both use the same standardized cable, which is pretty damned nice in my opinion. I was able to buy a couple additional cables at CompUSA, so that I could leave one at work and one connected to my workstation at home. This lets me charge my phone or transfer data between the phone/camera and the computer without disconnecting or transporting cables. Pretty nice in terms of convenience.

I'm totally not digging the fact that my receiver (an Onkyo TX-SR603) decided to take a crap on me over the weekend. When I last used it thursday night, it worked fine. When I went to watch some Star Trek with Jessica on saturday night, it worked less than fine. The monitor video outs, both S-Video and composite, where pretty much dead. No picture at all, even from the internal configuration menu. After much and annoyance, I plugged my TV into the Video1 outputs, which worked, so we were at least able to watch Star Trek. Not a permanent solution though. It's a good thing that I purchased that product protection plan when I bought the receiver though. I took it up to Circuit City yesterday, and they're going to send it off to their service center for repairs. If they can't fix it, I get a new receiver. I'm actually hoping that they can't fix it, so I can get the newest model of the same class (TX-SR604), which has newer nifty features like HDMI inputs and outputs.

frustrations homeaudio onkyo-tx-sr603 ppc6700

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