The following is not official.

Rob has always said that the warranty stickers are not the only thing they consider when working on warrantied units. They know how the players get damaged from misuse.

As an example. The display on my Mark2 actually went bad recently, and they replaced it free of charge, even though it went bad immediately after I added a second hard disk. The problem with the display was a known issue that affected only a handful of units. They knew the disk drive wasn't a factor, and were very kind about replacing the display.

The fact remains, though, that a hard disk replacement on an Empeg is more tricky and more dangerous than it would be with a desktop or laptop computer. So don't do it unless you're sure you can do it right.

Even if you do everything right, there are things that can go wrong that are totally out of your control, and Empeg would prefer not to have to spend support time helping you if this happens. For instance, someone on the BBS (was that "ynot"?) recently had his second disk go bad because the slave jumper fell off. He was able to resolve the problem himself, but what if he couldn't? He'd be forced to send his Empeg in and have them solve the problem for him. Sure, they'd be able to charge him for the repair time, but that's really a no-win situation because everyone is unhappy at that point.

With the expected increase in sales volume after the Rio purchase, I'm guessing that they're going to frown on user-upgrades even more. They need to be able to keep support costs down, and if they encouraged everyone to install their own hard disks, scenarios like the one above would become far too frequent.

___________
Tony Fabris