CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[Curt Palme]

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So here's something that I was not expecting:

A friend of mine brought me a small Mission 8" powered subwoofer yesterday, he found it literally in the trash. It looked to be in decent shape, but had a blown fuse in the amp module. The amp module was the typical amplifier module found in subwoofers, nothing special, but the amplifier itself was a small metal block with about 30 solder points going to the main PC board. No heatsinks, I'm guessing the metal case itself was the heatsink, and this moule was some sort of switching amp that's very efficient and doesn't generate a lot of heat.

THe reason the fuse was blowing is because the amp module had a dead short in it. I contacted Mission in the UK, and was told that the module was no longer available. That made the amp a throwaway, and I told my buddy that I could wire the speaker to terminals on the back and turn it into an unpowered subwoofer, or he could go to Part Express and buy a module if he wanted to.

FOr fun, I asked Mission how old the speaker was, and was told it was discontinued 3 years ago. Whoa! Designed to be disposable after 3 years of use, maybe 2 if a dealer was selling old stock?

I always considered Mission to be of a higher grade than the run of the mill off the shelf speaker. Alas, no more. Yet another piece of crap company cranking out disposable POS.

Just FYI.

[Curt Palme]

Register to remove this ad. It's free!

So here's something that I was not expecting:

A friend of mine brought me a small Mission 8" powered subwoofer yesterday, he found it literally in the trash. It looked to be in decent shape, but had a blown fuse in the amp module. The amp module was the typical amplifier module found in subwoofers, nothing special, but the amplifier itself was a small metal block with about 30 solder points going to the main PC board. No heatsinks, I'm guessing the metal case itself was the heatsink, and this moule was some sort of switching amp that's very efficient and doesn't generate a lot of heat.

THe reason the fuse was blowing is because the amp module had a dead short in it. I contacted Mission in the UK, and was told that the module was no longer available. That made the amp a throwaway, and I told my buddy that I could wire the speaker to terminals on the back and turn it into an unpowered subwoofer, or he could go to Part Express and buy a module if he wanted to.

FOr fun, I asked Mission how old the speaker was, and was told it was discontinued 3 years ago. Whoa! Designed to be disposable after 3 years of use, maybe 2 if a dealer was selling old stock?

I always considered Mission to be of a higher grade than the run of the mill off the shelf speaker. Alas, no more. Yet another piece of crap company cranking out disposable POS.

Just FYI.

[perisoft]

A company has two choices:

a) Charge insane markups to allow service many years after end-of-life
b) Charge a reasonable price and have shorter service times on the equipment that does die

So, if by 'higher grade' then you mean, 'like every other high end speaker company that builds a $10 box and sells it for $2000' I'm not sure higher grade is better.

Come on, Curt, you know what the markups on this stuff are; you know how hard it is to engineer and construct in quantity. Where's the justification for the pricing, and how is a company with reasonable pricing supposed to keep parts and infrastructure in-service for a decade after EVERY PRODUCT they make is gone?

Small volume and 'non-disposable' doesn't necessarily make it a better product. If your $300 speaker fails, you can buy it ten times over before you've paid as much as you would have for one 'fixable' speaker - which would then cost even MORE to fix. I see companies like Logitech out there making stuff like the Z5500 (IIRC; the newest one they make) and the quality per price is ABSOLUTELY INSANE. Yeah, you can't go in and fiddle with the transistors, but if you COULD, it would be a $2000 sub instead of a $200 sub that comes with five free little speakers.

This is not something to be upset about. People with more money than brains will always be able to satisfy themselves by buying something from a rip-off artist, but mass production and the ability to produce products with INCREDIBLE price/performance (eg, fifteen years ago ANY home theater projector would run $15,000 MINIMUM, when it's now possible to buy a new digital that gets you 80% of the way there for under $1k) is a VERY good thing.

If I could produce motion platforms like the 301 for $1200 at the cost of board-level field-repairability, I'd do it in a minute, because a thousand times as many people could experience them and the downside is basically nill for anyone but guys like you - who are VERY, VERY few and far between.

I'd rather let more people experience my product than satisfy a vanishingly small minority who like to fix things at a very low level.

[Curt Palme]

Funny how with all this talk about going green the world has become a disposable place. The point is, a subwoofer speaker and cabinet can last 50 years+, but a disposable amp makes the whole damn thing a throwaway.

I understand the world has changed, that doesn't mean I like it.

My point is, I've always thought of Mission as being higher end stuff, so I'd expect durability out of a product they sell. I'd expect servicability and parts availability over a POS Insignia brand that is the house brand at BB. Sad to see that companies like Mission are going for mass volume over quality and durability.

[Curt Palme]

Funny how with all this talk about going green the world has become a disposable place. The point is, a subwoofer speaker and cabinet can last 50 years+, but a disposable amp makes the whole damn thing a throwaway.

I understand the world has changed, that doesn't mean I like it.

My point is, I've always thought of Mission as being higher end stuff, so I'd expect durability out of a product they sell. I'd expect servicability and parts availability over a POS Insignia brand that is the house brand at BB. Sad to see that companies like Mission are going for mass volume over quality and durability.

[ecrabb]

Sorry, Peri, but I have to completely disagree. The way you're painting it - that it's an either/or choice between "insane markups" for service or "reasonable price" for short service times - just isn't a fair representation of the situation. At the least, it's not the whole picture. I tend toward disagreeing with you completely.

So you're saying a company can't keep a small stock of replacement modules (or at least parts to repair modules) without "insane markups". I say, bull****.

The real problem that has PLAGUED the industry for over 10 years now is that cheap disposable non-serviceable sh*t - like the wonderful "high value" made-in-China and Taiwan stuff from companies like Logitech (sorry, that's JUNK) is forcing the entire industry to lower their standards. Globalization and off-shoring has made it utterly impossible to compete with domestically-engineered and manufactured products - unless of course, people are willing to pay "insane markups" (just so the Americans that design and manufacture the products can make enough money to actually make their mortgage payments and car payments.) How does a company in the US or the UK assemble or manufacture anything and manage to compete against a company that imports speaker system made in China using what amounts to slave labor? It doesn't. It resorts to the same tactic just to stay alive. It manages to design and manufacture the best products it can given what the competition is doing. The result is the overall quality and longevity of almost all products falls to a lowest-common denominator - which is EXACTLY what has happened to the entire consumer electronics industry.

A perfect example is Miller & Kreisel. All their products were manufactured and assembled in the US. They started out building all hand-built audiophile satellite/subwoofer systems in the late 70's and early-80's. As the HT craze caught on, they made a name for themselves selling excellent surround setups in the$2500+ range, even selling systems to Lucasfilm and other popular studios for use in their audio production as reference loudspeakers. As the outsourcing and junk importers of the 90's started forcing pricing pressure on everybody M&K started building cheaper systems to compete (they probably shouldn't have). The result is that the owner of the company shut the company down. He wasn't willing to continue to lower quality or buy Chinese parts or assemble offshore, and it wasn't possible to be profitable building or assembling domestically, so he had no choice.

Mission Loudspeakers is simply another example of what was once a great company being purchased by a larger company to cash in on the name. Buy the name, cheapen the products, keep the retail prices the same and make money on it for awhile until the reputation is shot, then sell it off or kill it altogether after you've pocketed a few mil. It's happened thousands of times.

Sony is another example. It used to be high-quality gear made Japan. Not anymore. Now, most of it is Chinese junk like all the rest.

And what do we (as consumers) keep doing? We keep buying all the cheap junk "high-value" Wal-Mart/Dell disposeable sh*t we can get our hands on. Then, everyone stands around with their dicks in their hands like it's a big mystery why there's no manufacturing jobs left in the United States and the f*ck-stick politicians all promise they'll make it better when they know damn well they can't do a GOD DAMN thing about it.

Logitech quality per price insane. Gimee a f*cking break.

Sorry, you got me fired up, here.

SC

[Person99]

I think Peri has the practical side of it dead on. We live in the world that consumers chose. Can't complain about it now.

If I go to market with 2 products:
1) Product XXX the sells for $1000 and has a failure rate of <1% and a serviceable life of 10 years, and
2) Product YYY that does what XXX does but sells for $200 and has a failure rate of 10% and a serviceable life of 3 years.

People will line up at WalMart to buy Product YYY and Product XXX may even die in the market. The downside is we have a bunch of crap made in China and the horrible impact of stores like WalMart. The upside is, substantially more people get to enjoy using and doing whatever our hypothetical product does. So, a once exclusive thing (like say a projector) becomes available to more people to enjoy. You can argue on which is right or wrong, but the market has chosen--like it or not.

I do agree with Curt though that this is definitely at odds with any type of "Green ethos", but whoever said most people where rational?

[garyfritz]

Until "somebody" (most likely government, which is unlikely) forces companies to pay for the REAL costs of their products -- including all disposal / recycling / pollution costs -- the lowest-cost-wins ethic will always beat the make-good-stuff ethic. If companies had to pay for the genuine full cost of their product, they would have to pass that along to the consumer, and the cheap-crap products would suddenly be a lot less cheap. As they should be.

But in the meantime, companies will continue to produce cheap crap, people will continue to buy cheap crap, they will continue to load the landfills with disposable products, and Curt will continue to moan. I don't see it changing any time soon.

[Person99]

[Curt Palme]

[Curt Palme]

[perisoft]

[garyfritz]

Calm down, Dave. I'm not attacking you or your business model. I'm just engaging in some wishful thinking about the way I think things SHOULD work.

If my hobby happens to be hunting, and in the course of my hunting trip I shoot 3 or 4 of your cattle, I'll bet you'd want me to pay for the damage. If some kid likes to hotrod his car around town, and in the process he runs into my car or destroys my landscaping, you can be damnsure I'd want him to pay to fix it. If his reckless behavior resulted in injuring or killing someone, there would be serious legal and financial consequences. I think that's pretty obvious for everyone.

So why should a company be allowed to do the same thing without paying for the damages caused by their business practices?

In our business climate, for the most part corporations don't have to pay the actual full-lifecycle cost of producing and selling their products. Occasionally laws or lawsuits catch up with them (e.g. tobacco lawsuits, decades after the fact), but most of the time they can sweep those costs under the carpet for somebody else to pay. Even if the company eventually gets sued, the management who made the decisions will be long gone and will get off scott-free.

So given that humans follow incentives, and management of those companies are richly incentized to go for short-term profit without considering the overall long-term costs, **NATURALLY** they use business practices that cause pollution, sickness, and death. Naturally they form business models that sell addictive (but profitable) poisons to people, or dump their wastes into the air and water, or ignore the fact that their cheap crap will end up in a landfill in 3 years.

Should you pay the "pollution costs" for the electricity people use? No, since that's *their* usage. THEY should pay the true costs of the electricity they use. But yes, by this model you should pay the real cost of the steel. Which of course you would have to pass on to the buyer.

Which is what this all comes down to. If cheap-crap electronics have an authentic real cost 2-5x higher than their current selling cost, due to disposal, replacement, pollution, etc, then they should COST that much to the end consumer. (SOMEbody is going to pay it eventually, so it's only fair that the person who creates the demand for the product should bear the cost, instead of dumping it on me, or you, or your kids.) If the consumer has to pay what it REALLY costs, then the consumer will make different choices -- and maybe companies would find there's a market for quality (but lower "cost") products after all. And maybe companies would make business decisions that would be better for everyone.

Don't mind me, I'm just pipe-dreamin' ...

[Person99]

[perisoft]

[perisoft]

Oh, I missed a couple of things here:

[Bucketfoot]

[perisoft]

[Bucketfoot]

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for doing things to reduce our energy usage as well. It's just that I happen to live in a place called the "real world" where we know that this alone is not the solution.

I no longer have a problem with wind energy as the more modern slower spinning turbines are not the bird killers that Altamont Pass is. But don't kid yourself into thinking that this does one thing to eliminate coal or any other types of power plants. Wind turbines are not on-demand power and require a 100% matching source from another power source (most often coal).

Solar power for mass usage has pretty much the same issue, but both should still absolutely be pursued.

I grew up near the ocean in California and have never understood why there has not been a bigger push to develop tidal power plants. You want renewable energy... well here you go.

It is simply not a one issue quick fix problem. The way to get there is by doing all of it in moderation. We did not create our energy problems overnight and we sure as hell won't fix them overnight, no matter what any politician (or former VP) may try to tell you.

[drice1234]

[perisoft]