I just thought I'd throw in my $0.02 about crappy SonicBlue service. It is unrelated to empeg, so those of you that don't care, skip forward now.

A couple of years ago I purchased a video card manufactured by Diamond. Later, Diamond became SonicBlue in whatever manner. Later than that, my video card went bad. The card was still well under warranty (2 years into a 5 year warranty or some such). I called their support only to be redirected many times until I eventually got to ``legacy'' support. I was told that I had to pay them $20 or so just to talk to them, but if the card was found to be bad, I'd be refunded. Knowing that the card had to be bad (I'd had a friend who had the exact same symptoms, plus it was obvious), I agreed. The tech told me to try some things. I wasn't in front of the computer at the time, so I said I'd try them and call back, wanting to not be a jerky customer. So I did, and I called back and was told that I'd have to shell out another $20. I asked, just to make sure, that I'd be refunded the whole amount if the card was found to be bad. He said no! Only the call in which the card was found to be bad would be refunded. This means that the techs could arbitrarily drag out the troubleshooting process until they had ridiculous amounts of my money. Needless to say I yelled a lot until I was issued an RMA and all of the charges were refunded to me.

What this comes down to is that I really don't want to support SonicBlue in any way. But I really do want to support the empeg guys. I wish that empeg had stayed their own company or sold out to some less weasely company, like the Psychic Friends Network.