[thatonenoob]

The technical part of this fiasco is not relevant here IMHO.
Woo is selling a commercial product and at top tier prices no less. They should assure good aftersales regardless of the fact that the item is under warranty period or not. They could've simply asked John to ship the amp to them and charged him a fair price for the repair; which even if not ideal would've still been face saving. But the blaming nonsense and the blocking antics puts the company under a very bad light. I mean what were they even thinking?
I still hope that they realise that its never too late to apologize. Any problem in this world can be solved with a good healthy attitude. Admit your mistake and move on. Doesn't get any simpler.

good CS for a broken product isn’t a great way to go either. Anyways I’m just interested from an engineering perspective. No stake in the CS problem.

 

[WadaHiFi]

You've been here almost as long as I have, and you seriously believe that? Want to see an active thread where people have been trashing a sponsor's product due to malfunctions? I can also think of half-a-dozen others without much effort.



If a sponsor has their own forum then they can delete things posted in that forum. No sponsor has ever been able to moderate threads in the main forum.

Note: I was a moderator some years ago, but am not now.

I am not sure about a lot of technical stuff thrown out in this thread, but one thing for sure I know is using an absurd cable standard, blame the product failure on customer and third party, and blocking customer's calls isn't a very good business strategy

 

[vwong99]

The technical part of this fiasco is not relevant here IMHO.
Woo is selling a commercial product and at top tier prices no less. They should assure good aftersales regardless of the fact that the item is under warranty period or not. They could've simply asked John to ship the amp to them and charged him a fair price for the repair; which even if not ideal would've still been face saving. But the blaming nonsense and the blocking antics puts the company under a very bad light. I mean what were they even thinking?
I still hope that they realise that its never too late to apologize. Any problem in this world can be solved with a good healthy attitude. Admit your mistake and move on. Doesn't get any simpler.

Couldn't agree more. Never sweep your mistakes under the carpet.

Wrong means wrong lor...Just admit it sincerely lor and move on la....

 

[Zhanming057]

The technical part of this fiasco is not relevant here IMHO.

It's relevant because it's either a valid design choice or Woo is covering up a design defect.

 

[elira]

Now that the CS side of this incident is over, I’m curious as to what actually the technical issue here is.

Assuming moon audio cable isn’t broken, I’m confused by why this 5th connection is producing such a problem:


1) where is the ground reference - the case or the ground of the line in device. Reason why I ask is that if the ground reference is the case as is usually the situation it is unlikely that you will develop a circuit breaking voltage differential between the devices. If it isn’t then and the grounding is dependent entirely on the input devic then that should be made very clear.

2) Are we sure this is a short or is the input buffer simply incapable of handling large swing?

3) What DC level does your input expect. If you’re needing a ground reference explicitly does that mean you cannot handle fully differential signals with negative swing? Furthermore is the input buffer performing self biasing as should usually be done to prevent unwanted DC shift?

They have never explained why that input is that delicate, but Mike has advised multiple times against using it, always claiming that the usb input is superior.

It feels like they didn’t design a robust input that could work with most devices.

 

[thatonenoob]

I suspect a lack of self biasing or improper grounding between amp and case. But I will wait time see if they answer my previous post or if there’s something else up. There’s only that much hands off debugging to do

 

[Giru]

It's relevant because it's either a valid design choice or Woo is covering up a design defect.

I'm in agreement with what you're saying. I would also like to know what exactly is going on with the device and the 5 pin socket. But maybe this issue should be discussed in a different thread where the technical aspects of this and other related issues can be discussed without having other unrelated comments pollute the thread.

Anyway, i still feel the technicalities should've also been discussed in the correspondence between Moon and Woo, or with John himself. Instead of this the said brand chose to dilly-dally the matter and make the already frustrated customer more irate. Which has inevitably lead to this.The whole thing could've been averted.

 

[Zhanming057]

I'm in agreement with what you're saying. I would also like to know what exactly is going on with the device and the 5 pin socket. But maybe this issue should be discussed in a different thread where the technical aspects of this and other related issues can be discussed without having other unrelated comments pollute the thread.

Anyway, i still feel the technicalities should've also been discussed in the correspondence between Moon and Woo, or with John himself. Instead of this the said brand chose to dilly-dally the matter and make the already frustrated customer more irate. Which has inevitably lead to this.The whole thing could've been averted.

That is a fair assessment. One way or another, the treatment that John has received is unacceptable and that's the point of this thread.

 

[Zambu]

I don't have a Woo product so I don't have a personal "investment" in this... but just like (most of) everyone else, I enjoy my share of internet drama
I think on some level I can understand both sides reasonably well. But frankly I don't understand the need for a lengthy mail/phone/whatever arguing when this could have been just a normal boring customer service chain of "is warranty active: no" --> propose a repair process with cost estimate --> done; and the rest being done without customer (at least that's how I interpret it, not sure about the technical issues at hand)
The rest is just arguing and egos that went way overboard.

 

[JohnZS]

I don't have a Woo product so I don't have a personal "investment" in this... but just like (most of) everyone else, I enjoy my share of internet drama
I think on some level I can understand both sides reasonably well. But frankly I don't understand the need for a lengthy mail/phone/whatever arguing when this could have been just a normal boring customer service chain of "is warranty active: no" --> propose a repair process with cost estimate --> done; and the rest being done without customer (at least that's how I interpret it, not sure about the technical issues at hand)
The rest is just arguing and egos that went way overboard.

The funny part is they never mentioned warranty until this Monday by Jack. Mike never mentioned warranty until his reply to this thread today.

 

[Nettlesomeness]

Customer FIRST, to be honest such encounter deserves to be shared.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”- Warren Buffett

 

[Currawong]

Edited: Since the only reaction I get to trying to bring some sense to the lynch-mob mentality in this thread is to basically be called a shill for Woo Audio, whom I haven't spoke to anyone from for YEARS, I'm out.

 

[AnakChan]

I would think that if the Pentaconn socket is used for headphones, then GND wouldn't matter so much as such the Sony DAPs not grounding the 5th pole. As such balanced XLR headphone cables only have 4 pins.

However if the 4.4mm socket is used as IC, wouldn't grounding matter then just like balanced XLR?

 

[Whitigir]

Wait...why am I seeing @Vitaly2017 as the first poster of this thread ? Something has just burned ?

 

[JohnZS]

After reading all the emails, the problem appears to be that the way Mike wrote them made it appear like he was blaming the cable, even though if you read the actual wording he wasn't doing so. He simply said that the way the Moon Audio cable was designed wasn't appropriate for the WA11, but put it in the middle of the discussion about repair. If he had clearly separated out that discussion from the repair issue, I don't think this drama would have occurred.

He could have said something like "On a separate matter, we don't recommend using cables that aren't grounded on the source end with the 4.4mm input of the WA11."

Currawong,

I appreciate your attempt to put some good words about Mike and I think everyone should be able to express their thoughts.

That been said, let me be clear when I was saying Mike did blame Moon for the cable. He did say it on the phone that Moon's cable was not in the correct configuration, then when I emphasized to Mike the fact I have consulted with Moon's customer service about my specific setup before buying that cable from Moon. Mike then told me Moon did it wrong then, and that's the reason Mike specifically wanted me to contact Drew about how they did it wrong and how Moon should correct their cable design. You can clearly see that in the emails, I even reported back to him after I had a 'not so pleasant' phone call with Drew.

Hopefully, that helped to make more sense and cleared some confusion about why Mike suddenly in the email wanted me to 'teach' Drew from Moon Audio.

I don't blame Drew for having a bit emotion, but he took it pretty well and progress was made in that short phone call. Drew said he has a degree in EE and in the 20years of cable making he never heard something like that, they made so many cables even for WA11 alone. The fact two portable device needs ground is non-sense, and even if there was the 5th-pole, it will be a 'virtual-ground'(The exact word which I first learned from the phone call with Drew), not a true ground like tabletop devices. Drew also didn't believe how the missing 5th-pole shorted and damaged the circuit.

Again I appreciate your positive view of Mike, I think everyone should assume others in a positive way as you did to Mike. Just in this case, the truth is unfortunately not as good as you would like to see, and I feel bad for that as well.