Has the Quality of Consumer Electronics Declined? 890
NewtonsLaw asks: "With Christmas coming up I dare say that lots of people are going to spend big bucks on consumer electronics in the next few weeks. This column asks an interesting question -- are consumer electronics manufacturers sacrificing quality and reliability for an endless list of features? If you're like me, you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong -- but much of the stuff you've bought in the past 2-3 years is already giving trouble. What's more, it seems to be the big-name manufacturers such as Sony who are most affected by this decline in standards. I'd love to hear the experiences of other Slashdot readers in an effort to get as many data-points as possible. Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"
Quality! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Made in America = cheap as crap (Score:3, Informative)
Business Deals and Manufacturing (Score:3, Informative)
Best Kept Secret in CE (Score:3, Informative)
here come the hordes to say I'm just lucky....
Re:Something to remember... (Score:5, Informative)
Another example of this: IBM's low-end laptops were (and probably still are) made by Acer. Curiously, laptops sold under the "Acer" brand tended to have exactly the same specs as the low-end IBM laptops, and cost about $500 less.
$49 DVD Players Rule (Score:1, Informative)
As far as sony
In the end i feel consumers are constanly being ripped off. Things are not built the way they used to be,
Late
Some suggestions based on my experiences... (Score:1, Informative)
What I'm trying to say is that brand name doesn't mean very much anymore. Sony has built of this reputation of producing high-end equipment. I personally wouldn't buy any sony products. After a significant amount of research and comparisons, I know that my Technics player can blow nearly every Sony player out of the water (SACD players excluded of course) in just about every category - especially build quality. People just seem to get sucked into the Sony image (and don't even get me started on Bose). It's sad.
Unfortunately, unless you have a fair amount of cash to burn, I don't see very many ways out of this problem. Many inexpensive/low-end consumer electronics products are built quite cheaply.
I can offer a few words of advice though... Don't believe the hype - don't buy based on brand name. Spend some time researching before a purchase, you'd be amazed what you can find online.
I also want to make sure people are aware that for around the same price as a Sony (or whatever) you can usually pick up a much higher-quality (in terms of both build and performance) Denon, Marantz, or Toshiba (which I personally think has been getting better as time goes on).
Anyhow, my 2 cents...
Unfortunately, This is a trend with everything (Score:2, Informative)
But now that's changing. More and more customers are buying based on price alone and are willing to accept lower quality products -- in many cases because they've reduced the quality of their own products.
Lower quality products for the same price = higher profits = bigger raises for top executives.
Re:Quality is less, conolidation of parts is bad (Score:1, Informative)
Part of that is because turntables are different than regular electronics. The turntable is designed to convert a mechanical structure into electronic signal. That means it has mechanical parts and parts that drag over others. These things are well known to have short lives-motor bushings, needles, brake pads--and _ought_ to be easily replaced.
It used to be cheap to replace the $0.15 bushings in a motor. Now, that will cost $50 labor, and it's cheaper to replace the $40 motor.
That said, if you're going through a DVD player a year, maybe you should consider keeping your next one in an environment more free of smoke, dust, and high voltage discharges.
My Sony Experience (Score:5, Informative)
Executive Summary: I don't buy Sony anymore.
For a while Sony was my first choice. I bought a Sony SDR 2010 receiver in 1990, that lasted close to ten years. Two channel stereo, 165 watts per channel, digital inputs, Dolby surround. In the end the unit started acting erratically, sound levels varying randomly, the display exhibiting interesting if unintelligible optical effects. (Since replaced by a Denon 3801). I was very pleased with this unit and thus with Sony.
I then bought a Sony TC-WR565 cassette deck, which still provides good, if infrequent, service.
I also have a Sony answering machine which works fine.
But ...
I have a Sony CDP-C265 five disk CD player. It is the third unit because I had to return the first two. Both DOA. Even the third unit didn't always recognize all five CDs in the tray. And the shuffle feature would only work with four CDs, ignoring the fifth after playing one song. After a few years the audio out started to go with one or both channels dropping out. (Since replaced with a formerly beige now black PowerMac G3 as a dedicated MP3 player.)
Next I bought a Sony DVP-S550D DVD player. I wasn't sure about going with Sony, but the unit was getting very good reviews. This too had to be returned twice because of audio problems. Once for DVD playback and once for CD playback. My original unit was replaced with a refurbished one when the orginal was lost by either Sony or FedEx. Since getting the second unit I've had no problems.
I have a Sony cordless phone. After about a year the buttons started failing intermittently.
I'm on my second Sony portable CD player. The first just stopped recognizing CDs. (Since replaced by an iPod.)
I also have a pair of Sony noice cancelling head phones, purchased because they were $100+ cheaper than the overpriced Bose set. Most of the time they work fine but on some flights there is a continuous clicking that renders them unusable.
The only Sony product I've purchased in the past three years was an open box STR-DE525 receiver for less than $50. So they may have gotten their quality control problems fixed. But I doubt it.
Steve M
Re:That's easy (Score:4, Informative)
There are a number of avionics companies, two or three of them major leaders. And I did get the impression that quality was declining, although gadgets and prices were going up just fine. For the uninitiated here, these avionics boxes are big bucks (thousands) and aggravating as heck to fix. Plus in-flight failure is annoying, or worse. (Real pilots don't admit that a defective little gadget like an instrument would slow them down. More seriously, there is a certain amount of redundancy so that a point failure, compared to the failure of an engine, is rarely that big a deal. Nor is a failure welcome.)
Not all the cheap stuff is crap (Score:2, Informative)
Our 10-year-old TV screen now shows colour distortion, but the rest works fine. Our 10-year-old VCR has had to be repaired (dead heads) and I have had to crack it open several times for minor repairs also. It is showing wear in its moving parts.
The reason I don't replace them, or otherwise buy much in the way of consumer electronics these days, is the DRM problem. It's necessary to investigate each product carefully before purchasing, because the manufacturers don't exactly do out of their way to put "this is crippled crap" on the brochure. I was considering buying an MD player
them disabled in the shop before taking delivery. In Australia it is now ILLEGAL for a shop to disable Macrovision (so it looks like I bought my DVD player at the right time!!)
The other reason I don't buy much consumer electronics is that the stuff is not well integrated yet. Behind the stereo looks like a
rat's nest, so my first requirement is something to improve the cabling. Maybe a bus architecture?!? The gear doesn't "talk" to each other - when I turn on the TV, the stereo should turn on too, and set its input to TV. My VCR has a clock which loses its setting every time we have a power outage, plus I have to manually reset it twice a year for Daylight Saving. Why can't it self-synchronise on a timestamp from the TV signal, for example?
I don't want to buy another lemon like the Sony combined TV/VCR we got a few years ago. Not only does it have mono sound only (my fault for not checking enough) but its internal clock loses time on power loss (as above) and it cannot be reset while there are recordings programmed! That's one stupid device.
As for computer equipment (which to me is quite a separate thing from consumer electronics) I have found the quality is steadily improving over time. When I buy a card these days generally it comes with adequate documentation, not like a few years ago. These days, motherboards usually fit into cases (I've bought some where I had to start doing metalwork on the case just to get the mobo in). Various cards are usually compatible with each other nowadays (not like the SCSI card I had which couldn't be used with the ethernet card). Sure, hard disk warranties have gone down, and maybe they are more prone to failure than before - but they have always been prone to failure, and it has always been important to keep regular backups. Paradoxically, a dead CPU or mobo doesn't matter much because your important data is on the disc, yet the CPU is ultimately more reliable due to no moving parts.
So in general I don't think quality has gone down, or not much. My expectations have gone up a lot. I feel that manufacturers aren't paying attention to integrating products, at least in Australia. In Japan you can buy watches which self-synchronise off a low frequency AM radio signal.
I've been looking, for several years, for a digital clock radio which has a _digital_ tuning mechanism, as opposed to the ones which tune a capacitor and use string to pull an indicator across a frequency indicator. I can't understand why such a simple requirement is completely ignored by the manufacturers. It must be cheaper to produce a digital tuner than one containing strings and pulleys, at least. Actually I found one about 18 months ago but the price was well out of my range, and I was in a specialty store for "geek toys" at the time; I have never seen one in any of the usual department stores where the bulk of the population buy their electronics.
Re:Sony "Quality" vs. "Service".... (Score:2, Informative)
The first VCR didn't at all work out of the box. I brought it to Sony service (about a half-hour drive away). They mailed me a new one, but I had to wait two weeks for it to get there. When the replacement arrived, I discovered that the front panel buttons worked sometimes, so I would have to do everything with the remote (good thing I had a spare left over from the original VCR). I decided it was too much time and trouble to send it back, just to get the same model again, so I've been making do.
The TiVo shit the bed after the first month with a contant reboot problem, and I took a little trip over to Sony service. It took a couple weeks for them to replace the hard drive. It was still under warranty when the fan started to make bad noises. Rather than give up the TiVo for another two weeks, I removed the "DO NOT OPEN THIS BOX" sticker with a razor blade and replaced the fan myself.
After all that, I've never been able to get the magical Sony TiVo-to-VCR auto-record feature to work. The phone tech suggested that I bring both items to Sony service. Fuck that noise.
I'll never buy Sony again.
Re:Economy Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Nowadays we shouldn't have to depend on salespeople to know every detail about every product. They have hundreds/thousands of products in their stores-- even a Slashdot geek would have problems keeping current on the detailed specs on all those items.
Consumers have a huge advantage over salespeople. We can actually research the items we want in depth since we have the advantage of focussing on at most a handful of items. Thanks to how easy it is these days to exchange information it's trivial to get in-depth specifications on whatever we want.
Remember the Bad Old Days before most major vendors had their product info online? People were lucky to find any information anywhere. Brand, faith, and luck were pretty much all we had.
Now, however we can pop right on over to the various manufacturers' websites and get all the information we could want about the product. No info available? Hmmm, maybe that product drops off the list right there.
As if that wasn't enought, we can go to Consumer Reports' website [consumerreports.org] and see what they think of a product. We can go to Epinions [epinions.com] and see if a bunch of people we don't know are griping about it. We can check Reseller Ratings [resellerratings.com] to see if an online store is screwing people over, or really trying to do business.
This kind of information flow has the potential to really improve quality and reward quality as word of crappy products/merchants gets out. In addition, we get a better statistical sampling since we have more people commenting than just the one or two we might know who bought the same thing.
Unfortunately, the bitter portion of me has to concede that most people just don't have the motivation to do any research. To them, I say you deserve what you get.
Bad Capacitors (Score:2, Informative)
As mentioned on ./
a month or so ago [slashdot.org], poorly manufactured capactors seem to the the primary cause of modern failures. There have also been several other articles regarding this problem on several techie sites ie. NASA Tech Briefs.
Working for a tv station, we have seen this on damn near every DVCPro component we purchased 3 or 4 years ago.
Every machine has had hundreds of these small caps replaced, but the manufacturer will not admit the caps have an unusually high failure rate.
These same caps were/are also used in hundreds of consumer products, although I have heard the "bad batch" of these caps have since passed.....we'll see.
Computers, CAD and FEA are part of the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
As an avionics technician I can attest that consumer electronics is not the only field suffering.
I agree. People here wonder why I rant about my great old cars, but it's the same thing with them. Sure, the assembly quality of a Honda Accord is better than my 1970 Dodge Dart, but the Dart is overbuilt and survives the abuse of daily life far better.
Consumer electronics are the same. Back when manufacturing quality of components was poorer, the standard resistor tolerance was +/-20%! If you were designing a circuit which called for a 1k resistor, you'd have to budget on getting anything from 800 ohms to 1.2k hitting the assembly line. As a result, you specified a better rated transistor or other part. It cost a little bit more, but the net effect was that it lasted better. 5V on the supply to the logic? Okay, we'll use 6.3V electrolytic capacitors to bypass the RF! Not to mention the plastic crap everywhere...
Compare a modern VCR with a 20-year-old top-loading VHS boat anchor. Mechanically, they have to do exactly the same things to the tape. And yet the old VCR was built with steel or cast components, plastic only where it was essential. Idler pucks were sintered bronze and rubber and could be changed in minutes by a competent technician. Now, idlers are little plastic gears on plastic bearings which get loose quickly. Improved sophistication of the electronics have added features but the mechanisms are utter garbage.
Yes, I would pay more for a VCR that would last longer. Yes, I would pay extra for a motherboard that I knew had 25V capacitors on the 5V rails, or where I knew that ICs weren't pushed to their rated maximums everywhere.
I collect 1950s TV sets. Funny thing about them: steel or copper chassis, and 1/2 watt resistors everywhere, even where I calculate 1/8 watt loads. Capacitors were even more fragile then than they are now, so 450V-rated capacitors being used to filter 170V rectified AC line were commonplace. Stuff was built to last. Interestingly, only one of my antique sets came to me frankly broken; the rest needed adjustments or replacements of old (not failed) components. (I don't think I'll count 50 years of ingress of ambient humidity into a paper capacitor as a design flaw.)
I blame CAD software and automated finite element analysis for starting a trend.
If you build 500,000 units (a fairly small production run) and can cut 1 lb off the weight of a vehicle by using thinner sheetmetal in the floor, you've just saved 500,000lbs of raw steel. That's a few bucks... about $30,000, depending on the alloy and stamping considerations. The owner is not going to go out and measure the thickness of the steel of the car's floor.
To protect it from rust, you use today's improved paints to protect the floor. Of course, the underside of the car gets scratched by stones, and rust sets in. Because of the thinner steel, the floor rusts through faster. Most people scrap the car at this point; a premature end. Fine, the dry-cleaning hooks might be beautifully placed, but it's all the same to the car crusher.
To allow engineers to be able to say, "22 gauge steel will do" when instinct calls for 20-gauge, CAD and finite element analysis provide a rigorous mathematical proof that corners can be cut.
Sliderules calculated to three or four significant figures. As you went from step to step in a design calculation, you'd round things up or down automatically, and the compounded error would be far greater than it is now. But through intelligent rounding (ie. "The driver weighs 184.34lbs - call it 185 lbs..."), the error always worked out on the favor of design strength. Now, you park 12 significant digits in a variable on your calculator as you work the problem.
Note that the final design is more accurate, but the rounded-up design from a sliderule is superior in real-world survivability. Unfortunately, as margins get smaller and smaller, manufacturers are forced to adopt this tactic to save raw material.
In 1970, GM tested the first prototype of the Chevrolet Vega, which was GM's first CAD-designed car. It suffered a structural failure after only 8 miles on the test track. They had to add over 8 pounds of steel structure to reinforce the car. (Read John DeLorean's "On A Clear Day, You Can See General Motors".)
Honda cars are built out of such thin sheetmetal that I can - and have - dented them with my thumb. They derive their strength from the shape of the material, not from the material itself - it's just a four-wheeled soft drink can. This cuts cost and raises gas mileage at the expense of long-term durability. If the passenger places his or her foot hard enough on the floor, relatively modern (~1996) Accords flex enough that the brake lights go on. I wouldn't want to know where a Honda would bend if I went to Home Depot and used the trunk to bring home a couple of bags of topsoil for my flower garden.
It's easy to tell if three fat people have ever gone over a bump in the back seat of a 1981-1989 Dodge Aries or Plymouth Reliant four-door. (During the life of a car, if you think about all the weird people you've had in the car, and all the conditions you can expect.) The design budget is typically 200lb per passenger, which means that the expected rear seat load is about 600 lbs. Let's say three people at 250lbs, the load on the car's structure is 150lbs more than rated. That's effectively another person in the back seat. Go over a bump the wrong way, and bingo! You've got those trademark little cracks on the roof, right where they meet the rear pillar.
Computers in design have allowed us great things - faster design cycles, greater sophistication. But they've also taught manufacturers how to cut corners.
Re:Economy Issues (Score:5, Informative)
I'll try to sum up the major factors without going into extreme detailed explanations:
THD (Total Harmonic Distortion): How much the equipment distorts the signal, usually as a percentage. Naturally, lower is better here. A high end amplifier might be around 0.0001%.
SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio): The difference between signal amplitude and the noise floor (the hiss sometimes heard between songs, which is there during the songs, just hard to notice then). Usually measured in dB, you want this to be high. CD had a theoretical limit of 96dB, which was a limit etched in the hard stone of mathematics and physics of traditional design. However, smoothing done whilst still in the digital domain can break this limit. Having said that, 96dB is a fantastic figure, be happy with it if you find it, but don't settle for anything less these days. Any decent power amp should be able to have an SNR higher than 96dB, really high end amps go above 120dB.
Sometimes these two are refered together as distortion+noise.
Channel Separation: How well the equipment can prevent the signal from one channel (left and right) from imposing itself into the other channel, which reduces the stereo effect and is generally undesired.
Wow and Flutter: are measurements that show how much the speed of playback changes, and thus the pitch and resulting sound. These apply to older analog equipment like record players and tape decks. CD players use a digital FIFO (first in first out) buffer that is run at a precise speed with accurate quartz timing. However, it can be written to at alternate speeds, so as the buffer becomes too full, the CD is slowed down and as it becomes too empty the CD is sped up, assuring the listener that there are no interuptions. Because the buffer is read at quartz accurate intervals, any wow and flutter is so riduculously small, that they are almost unmeasurably irrelevant. Which is why CD player (and other digital equipment) specs either don't specify wow and flutter at all or try to make the equipment look great by stating that it is unmeasurably low (true of any digital equipment from the cheapest peice of garbage to the sound systems in your local Imax cinema).
Dynamic Range: is the difference between the softest sounds and the loudest sounds. Also measured in dB's, we also want this to be high. It means that listening to classical music for an example, you could just hear the faint noise of orchestra members flipping pages of music notation one second and then be physically assaulted the next with loud music. However, this is one thing that can be over done, with the effect of music being too loud for your enjoyment in some parts and too soft to hear in others.
The most important thing, I rarely see mentioned, is that the transducers (speakers) are by far the weakest link in an audio system. You could buy a $50 CD player with a THD of 0.001% and $100,000 speakers with a THD of 0.1%. So whether you buy a $50 CD player at 0.001% THD or a $500 CD player at 0.0001% THD, at the speakers you are still basically going to hear a THD of around 0.1%.
So the moral here is, spend about 70% of your budget on the speakers, 20% on the power amp and the remainder on everything else!
The Worlds best amplifier, coupled with the Worlds best CD player, are going to sound like crap with anything less that good speakers.
But on the other hand, the Worlds best speakers, coupled with ordinary, low end consumer level CD player and amp from Target, is going to sound MUCH MUCH better and probably not be noticed as "worse" than the "best system" by one of these "audiophile" morons in the HiFi magazines.
The second most important thing is... HEADPHONES!
Headphones are:
* Much cheaper than speakers that give the same quality. Try hundreds to thousands of TIMES cheaper.
* Require much less power, thus much less amplification and thus much less THD.
* Filter out ambient noise as a matter of simple design, allowing greater enjoyment of dynamic range.
* Allow far greater channel separation than speakers and thus much greater stereo effect.
* Allow you to turn your music up to where you enjoy it most, without the cops knocking on your door at 11pm.
Anyone who really enjoys their recorded music and knows how to enjoy it, enjoys it with headphones.
Have I forgotten any major points?
PS, when I'm talking about high end power amplifiers, I'm talking about the likes of the Pioneer M-91. Absolute legends. If you're offended because your NAD doesn't stack up, oh well.
How much do you want to spend? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Economy Issues (Score:2, Informative)
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07012
Great source for headphones (Score:2, Informative)