boblinds- From Scott's message, I got the impression we'd all be doing our own chip swap. I doubt they could cut a deal with a "service provider" fast enough, *and* that would have coverage in all the locations where 950's now reside. Otherwise, you'd have to ship your unit, which contradicts what Scott says.

Just have to ground yourself, and be careful not to bend the pins... No biggie.

[This message has been edited by Kevin C Brown (edited March 17, 2003).]

Kevin and I read the same quote and came up with diametrically opposed interpretations.

Perhaps Outlaw saved money earlier by not spending much on QA'ing the 950..

Chapter One: Whereupon those who live in the disagreeable world of unpleasant AV product glitches proceed to stampede into the dramatically detailed perfection where QA dollars prevent any unpleasant surprises and everything works as well as my microwave, which worked nicely until a thunderous storm scared it into a great decline

To use a case in point, when was the last time your cell phone or microwave needed a firmware update to fix a bug? Ever bring your fuel injection unit in for a bug fix? This sort of thing could happen, but it is very very rare

Chapter Two: Adventures in programming Polyphonic Ring Tones for less hearty souls who desire greater dependability in a unit, which produces melodies.

I always thought a beta test of 5 was incredibly small, too small to be really useful as anything more than a marketing test.
The bugs found bear this out. Our last beta was ~2500 users over several months, and at the end the product is very solid, even though that was a small beta test IMO

Chapter Three: Enron economics are applied whereupon companies are assured by accountants that more test units than projected sells of said units is a figure guaranteed to raise the company’s status on paper and increase stock value

But maybe we should not feel too sorry for the Outlaws for spending money on warranty fixes, if the Outlaws saved money by not testing as thoroughly as we might have hoped

Chapter Four: Strongly illustrative of the position that company’s whom document the least bug occurrences (when someone has been counting) than companies which are happy to sell their bugs at higher commission, are not to be faulted for bemusement over the fact that A: you can have less bugs. B: you can fix them quickly but C: you shall be vilified for ANY BUG AT ALL, after presenting said bug at the cheapest going rate.

insert all replies here

Chapter Five: In which a certain female thinks she had better go away and goes accordingly stepping gently and comfortably into the fire after deserting the frying pan…preparing for extraordinary calamity to befall.

in my business i have a cast-in-concrete rule: i don't do anyone's warranty service work for them for free.

this glitch doesn't effect my system, but if it did, there is no way i would open this box myself to correct someone else's mistake.

sorry, outlaw...the advertisement said "DTS-ES", so fork it over.

Well, perhaps, but is it safe to presume that the beta you describe was for a software product that ran on a known hardware platform? If you are doing that sort of thing, a large beta not only makes sense, but it is relatively inexpensive to do. Yes, there are the development costs, of course, but you don't have to supply everyone with the hardware.

Perhaps some might say the Outlaw beta sample could have been larger, but how many reasonably expensive, one might even presume to be hand-built pre-production units would you expect them to build for a test? Remember, they would have to provide BOTH the hardware and software in such an enterprise!

But what do I know, I'm only a dog!

ARF ARF, says Iggy

Methinks the five beta testers tested near-production units that were built by machine mostly, rather than by hand. But to paraphrase one of the great K9 typists, what do I know, I'm only human.

[This message has been edited by Will (edited March 18, 2003).]

Lena... Chapter 3... Perfect!

You are correct. And I'm not promoting the idea that the 950 should have had a 10,000 unit beta, but illustrating the fact that a 5 unit 'beta test' is more a test marketing exercise than anything. One reason software betas are so big is actually due to the fact we're not supplying the hardware - so we can be reasonably sure the product works on a broad cross section of configurations. This does not apply to an embedded system but the other reasons do apply.

But the beta issue has more to do with previous problems, like the hiss problem. This case, DTS-ES not working properly should have been caught in QA at the latest. Management creates a specification, engineering implements it, manufacturing builds it and QA tests against the original specification before release. It's not that complex.

The things QA tests, or put differently the tests that are run, should be designed to verify each part of the spec under a variety of conditions. Generally a very large 'test matrix' is developed to assist in this task.

there is no way i would open this box myself

Scared to death to tell my husband he might have the opportunity to do so. You see, he was known by his parents for popping tops off boxes (radios-record players-motors) when very young. However he was not known for his reassembling skills simply leaving a conspicuous trail documenting his desire to ‘see how things worked’.
Well, actually now the family frequently calls on him to put things back together eating up many of his spare hours. He would have far too much fun with this.

Hopefully, they will have tested to see if there was still no LFE information being sent to the sub when the speakers are in the SMALL mode.

The re-routing of bass from the other speakers could potentially fool you into thinking you were getting ALL the bass information on the DTS track.

Hopefully, everything will be rosie on this new E-PROM and will contain this fix as well as all of the revisions so far.

Yup, I still feel that the R&D money could have been better used for a serial upgrade port and flashable chips with more memory for more features (Anthem AVM-20 style) than a mediocre radio tuner. But, we all know about hindsight.

As for opening the case and swapping out the chip, it looks like it would be as easy as my old Millennium 2.4.6 DTS decoder, which I had to upgrade similarly to accept DTS DVDs (although, that took both an E-PROM and a new Motorola processor chip swap-- luckily both were socketed). The socket (from the pictures of the inside guts) looks to be in plain view and accessible without too much fuss.

Dan

[This message has been edited by Dan Hitchman (edited March 18, 2003).]