[Mike Rivers]

hank alrich wrote:

Would a magazine publish a review that essentially said, "The
manufacturer has blown it with this piece of kit and it doesn't work as
intended or advertised. My suggestion is that nobody buy this product
until the manufacturer figures out how to issue a version that works.

These days, probably not, but then again, these days such a review
probably wouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't hesitate to warn users who
fall into a certain class about certain shortcomings. For example, I'm
pretty sure I mentioned in my Mackie 1200F review that at the time I
wrote it, Vista drivers weren't available and that Vista users have
reported mixed results from OK to Doesn't Work At All. I would hope that
should be sufficient warning, but some people will buy anyway figuring
that Vista drivers MUST be right around the corner.

I wrote the review nearly a year ago (it was published sometime over the
Summer) and a Vista driver still isn't available. It's not my place (or
the editor's) to rag on Mackie for that, but it's certainly the reader's
responsibility to consider the situation if he's already using Vista or
plans to upgrade soon. As far as the problems I've been having with the
A&H, before I write anything about questionable hardware or drivers, I
want to be very sure that it isn't a problem that I can correct by
changing something in my system. Maybe it really is just a poorly
fitting plug (though it seems that the driver should recover more
gracefully from this sort of communication error). Maybe it really does
prefer a different Firewire interface chipset. These are the things I
want to try to sort of, and that means learning about some things than I
really want to. But that's what it takes to keep up the Lamborghini
payments.

"Before I write anything about questinable hardware or drivers . . . "?
Who am I kidding? By posting here, what I've said in trying to learn
about what might be wrong will be preserved on web sites I've never
heard of, probably for the next hundred years. But I hate those posts
that say, essentially "I have a problem. Can someone tell me why?"



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