Most of us experinced the best customer service ever here.
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Thatās right. But it should be far more preferable that a reality exists where customers have no need to seek out service in the first place. Esoteric havenāt heard a whimper out of me since I bought any of their products.
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Fair questionā¦but I think the difference is, bad experience usually needs clarifying conversation (if itās not long ago and case finished with just personal need of replying in anger). Both, the scenario before and in brackets is better served in a separate thread imo. Good experience is mostly just a temporary singular post with no need of reaction.
But to be honest I would even prefer a separate praise thread if the same praise would be repeated as penetrantly in various threads as Brodricās age old DMP problem before his switch of brands (which I absolutely accept as a bad experience for him).
If I bought a Daimler with bad experience and moved on to a BMW, would I keep on posting in a Daimler forum about this experience? Probably not for good life time and priority reasons.
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@Brodric just promise that if your Esoteric gear does crap out at some point you will let us know. Inquiring minds want to know, as they say on this side of the world.
One of the problems with many things digital is the complexity of the software. A quote from the book The Internet of Risky Things:
āWhen it comes to the physical world, engineering generally worksāwith software, not so much. A friend in grad school once quipped, āSoftware engineering is the field of the future, and it will always be the field of the future.ā Although this was several decades ago, it is unfortunately still true.ā
I only penetrantly repeat the age old problem when somebody else mentions they have the same problem. Which serves a minor purpose, at least in moral support of the other person. Itās not as if Iām randomly shooting from the hip willy-nilly for nefarious purposes.
I do understand that frequent visitors here might feel that way when somebody says āmy DMP was DOAā and then I jump in and say āso was mineā. But again this comes back to my earlier point, if people werenāt receiving DOA products I wouldnāt be jumping in with my penetrant repetitions.
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Iām not sure which post of mine youāre referencing, but Iām sorry something I said made you think sales is our one and only priority. That is patently not the case.
We have a full time service team, and our sales and engineering team help out when needed. We arenāt perfect but weāre constantly striving for better. Repairs are being turned around in 3 days now. The code base behind the DMP and our older generation of products is being completely rewritten as well.
We also plan to include remote troubleshooting software built into future products to ensure we can quickly and easily address problems in the field.
Improvements are being made day after day.
I appreciate you and others sharing your experiences good and bad. We want our forums to be a place of robust discussion, not just our corner of the internet that we can whitewash.
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I will, for sure. And Iām fretting that day if it comes because I suspect getting a busted Esoteric something fixed will be far more difficult than getting a busted PS Audio something fixed.
You said the priority was to get your new products out the door, and getting the Power Play feature of the power plants working again, in some form, was second to that. Hence my reasonable conclusion from that, that selling stuff takes a higher priority than fixing stuff. And PS Audio continued to sell DMP for at least a year before the first attempt at a fix was put out. At least PS Audio is working on that power play feature. It is still an advertised feature of the product, and itās getting close to a year now since it worked.
I donāt think itās appropriate to conflate me saying Power Play is a secondary priority to product development with we donāt care about service.
Power Play is currently slated for this summer. The only other thing currently ahead of it on our engineering teamās plate is wrapping up the Stellar Phono.
Well, I apologize if I came to the wrong conclusionā¦I do of course change my conclusions in the light of new information. I do appreciate the insight you give us to the inner workings of whatās going on in your work. Please understand that there are 2 issues that were important to me, that have taken a year or more to get fixed, that havenāt been fixed. That can lead to frustration, particularly when confronted with the volume of new products that PS Audio is rolling out before the old products are fixed properly. And particularly also when you say, and you did say it, that the priority is rolling out the new products.
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I understand, Iām even interested to read about such things in case of different individual occurrences like ironās and initially yours and Iām not shy to write about mediocre experiences as well if occurring ā¦the kind and intensity of your repeated jump inās and picking up chances might be just a problem of frequent visitors 
actually, it is, as MSB prices go, worth EVERY penny they charge for the clockā¦spending the base amount without fully equipping the DAC it is not the way to goā¦even the $6k preamp module is a Substantial upgrade alsoā¦these options are like buying true racing tires for a race car.
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I just hope itās Tedās sole prerogative to decide when this thing is production ready, before they start selling it to customers. Unlike the shambles that was the DMP project when a product that was known not to work properly was sold to customers on the promise that a simple software fix will quickly follow. Which didnāt happen. After-all, itās his name on the boxes.
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In case you werenāt aware of the Power Play backstory. From inception it didnāt work properly for years. And Iām talking about, probably 5+ years. Some of us complained about it time and time again on the forum, and directly to PS Audio outside the forum. āYeah, we know, weāre working on itā. Nothing happened. āYeah, weāve hired a new programmer and her first priority is to fix Power Playā. A year or so later and it still didnāt work properly. Then one day, by some miracle, it worked! Hallelujah, deliverance of the PS Fix-It Gods, they finally came through for us, after all this time. And our faith has been restored! It worked properly for about a year after that, then it didnāt work at all. And it since hasnāt worked for about a year. Now, since about 2011, this has been an advertised feature of the Perfect Wave series power plants, and it still is. It worked properly for about one year in eight. That speaks to me at a certain volume, where priorities might lay in fixing stuff that doesnāt work properly.
Iām talking here about a chronic illness of the brand, taking years to fix. Iām not talking about an acute illness, where something might break down, send it back to PS Audio, they fix it and send it back. PS Audio are good at fixing the acute illness, no doubt about that. Where they struggle is fixing the chronic illness.
p.s. @Elk. Move this one also. Thanks.
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This is something Iād confirm from my perception. I take into consideration that I donāt know products with a similar price/performance ratio and speed of innovation and their connected priority of chronic bugfixing. Iām also aware that for ~25k more per component, one can expect and gets a different level of priority on that and that for some customers this has generally first priority.
Afaik the SW dept. was newly organized recently, so they should get some time to build this up. One usually gets perfect quality control OR speed. Mostly both is wanted without comfortable staffing 
I admire PS Audio for what they are trying to do. A smallish company trying to push the boundaries while not catering solely to tech millionaires or investment bankers. And thatās not easy. The truth is that we need more boundary pushers like them in the US. But it was probably easier when you could source everything domestically and things were āover-engineered.ā
Iāve never regretted my purchase of a DSJ. On the other hand, if I could afford dCS or Esoteric or mbl, Iād probably do it. Thankfully perhaps Iām not in that boat. But I do enjoy hearing from those who are.
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PS Audio is a āgood ideasā company. They push the ideas limits and invent cool stuff. They were the first to do the after-market power cable genre. They were the first to do the stand-alone power regeneration genre. The digital lens, and no doubt a couple of other things as well. Where they struggle to various degrees is what comes after the āgood ideaā.
As I see it their two biggest problems that have an adverse bearing at the customer coal face as: selling under-baked products that simply arenāt robust enough to survive wider distribution in the field; and Quality Control, particularly the stage between when a product is built, and when itās packed for shipping. There is so much stuff out there that arrives on the porch of an eagerly awaiting customer that, when the box is opened, there is a defect of some sort. Paul assures us that everything that leaves the factory is thoroughly checked and works perfectly. Itās just very difficult to correlate that assurance with all the reports we see here of stuff arriving DOA, or with cosmetic issues, or whatever else.
And third to those. The extreme disparity in the PS Audio experience that some International customers get in offshore markets compared to US customers.
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Thatās does seem to be a problem based on a number of peopleās experiences. Iām sure Iām not atypical when I say that if I pay any price premium (and there is one for PS Audio gear), I expect the gear to last at least 5-10 years problem free. Thatās why Iām still running a rebuilt Nait2 in my smaller system. For about 20 years I rarely turned it off. And when the buzzing got too loud, I had it rebuilt.
I would echo the overseas comments. I donāt understand why there is so much disparity.
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Stuff can be built to last. It comes down to the quality of the engineering and construction. 13+ years Halcro dm8/10 pre-amps and Halcro dm88 mono power amps have been in world wide service and not a single failure requiring warranty attention. Design it right. Build it right. Pack it right. Deliver on all marketing promises. Support it right. Equals happy repeat business customer.
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