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One reason why I'm frightened to post these days is that I'm afraid that I'll turn into that famed reversible acronym (one way) and initialism (the other way), the Mog and the GOM. If you don't know the difference between an initialism and an acronym, amble off to Gutshot and chat to the skilled players and vocabularists there. This place is going to become elite-city.
Today's "miserable old git" and/or "grumpy old man" is aimed at Hitachi Europe, on two fronts. Incompetence but friendliness is reserved for Curry's Digital.
I bought a Hitachi AX-M13 something something something yesterday, and I got round to putting it together today. On the box it claims to be a 30 watts per channel micro hi-fi with a seaparte amplifier, that also plays MP3s, is a digital radio and can connect to your MP3 player via a USB port at the front.
Three hours and one round trip to Curry's Digital (which, for want of familiarity, I will henceforth call Dixon's) later, I've still no idea if it will play MP3 discs, and the USB connection remains stubbornly inoperative. But that, overall, is ok. Because I finally got the digital radio working.
I'm still vaguely bemused by the Hitachi instruction book, and by the way the radio works. If you are in FM, you press the tune up, the search takes place, until a station is found, at which point it stops. That's what the instruction manual tells you to do under the FM section. And that's what you do on most push-button radios.
Under the DAB section, it tells you... nothing. And there's no contact details for Hitachi either. The "troubleshooting" section covers a few simple points but nothing that is likely to occur.
Anyway, I ran the auto-scan, and ended up with Chill. I pressed the tuner upwards button and it rotated through all the stations, but when I stopped, it returned to Chill (unlike in FM, where it stayed on the channel found). I tried the manual tune up button and the "go up one channel" button, which just returned the line "P2 is empty". Hmm, I thought. Faulty aerial?
I tried to make sure that the aerial was correctly fitted, only to find that I couldn't remove it. At this point, everything went to "no signal".
What, I ask, would your conclusion be? By this time I'd reached a Hakallah stage that necessitated a return to Dixon's, who willingly replaced the by now somewhat damaged item. Well, first of all a youngster talked about "boosters", then a regular guy said "no, radios don't have boosters. And when I told him that my other DAB Radio worked fine, he accepted that the aerial might be faulty. A replacement item was brought round, and I returned home.
Second time around, and after an hour of the same "Chill Only" problem, I looked up the web. Hitachi's offerings make no mention of this model, but they did have another Digital Radio, with a pdf of instructions. It said that you tune to the desired channel, and then press the "select" button.
Hmm, I wondered, does my remote have a "select" button? Well, yes, it does, although it's cunningly diguised as the "play" button. So, what you have to do for Digital to tune to a new station is completely different from what you do to tune to a station under FM. With digital channels, you hold down the tune up button, and then when it gets to the station you want, you have to press the "play" button to select it. And Hitachi makes no mention of this anywhere in the instruction booklet. How many people, I wonder, have this model, forever glued to Chill FM, blindly asuming that they are in an area of poor reception. So, GOM mode today is HITACHI YOU SUCK. Oh, and you've wasted my entire Saturday afternoon, TYVM you shitbags.
Oh, and I tried the USB to play my Rio Karma. Result, "no USB" message. Then I tried it to play my Zen. Result, "no USB message". I assume that there ARE MP3 players with which this heap of fucking junk works, but I don't own any of them.
On the plus side, as a CD player it's great, and the sound quality is excellent. What a pity that the manual writers are absolute idiots. Then again, what do you expect.
It's quite possible that my MP3 players do work with the Hitachi and, like with the non-existent instructions on how to get the DAB Radio to work, it requires some cunning button pressing in an obscure combination.
What pisses me off is that a 20-page manual could quite easily cover these matters if any effort was put into manual writing. But Page one is a drawing of the device, and page 2 is blank. Pages 3 and 4 contain the normal Do's and Dont's (and, yes, those apostrophes are correct) like "Don't listen to headphones at high volume, as such use can permanently damage your hearing" and helpful things like "consult your dealer", for which, read "but whatever you do don't consult us, and we won't give you any contact details even if you felt like trying".
You then get the bits on putting the machine together, and things like "how to install the batteries in the remote". Apparently, "when the batteries are exhausted, the remote control can no longer operate the system". Yes, this is the shit that they put in.
Stopping off only to get another "be sure to turn the volume down before using headphones", we then get "Listening to radio broadcasts". Half a page of this, none of which tells you how to listen to radio broadcasts. It tells you how to do the autoscan, and what will happen if no stations can be found, but not how to listen to the radio.
You then get told how to set the clock, on which a page is spent. The FM tuning bit is quite useful. So there's an obvious conclusion to be drawn, isn't there? This product is an update of a product that used to be an FM radio only and CD player only. The digital facility has been added, but the instruction manual has only been rewritten hurriedly. Hitachi, a donkey company.
Oh, and the USB option is a new addition too, probably a more recent one, because the instruictions on this are four lines long. Yes, a page and a half on seting a clock, and four lines on using a quite important function. Then there's a whole page on setting the sleep timer and the "daily on" timer.
What is it with those sleep timers on HiFi systems? Does anyone use such timer thingiess except with a bedisde radio?
Then you get advice on handling a CD, in case you have just time-travelled from the stone age.
There are six "trouble-shooting" points, eery one of which is about as useless as one could expect. Any problems? Consult a qualified person, such as your dealer", for service.
Then there's a couple of blank pages again, where some contact details would have been nice.
Luckily, I found that Hitach in Europe is in Maidenhead, part of the Direct Media Group. Perhaps they might want to think about compiling a decent manual.
You see what I mean about grumpy old man mode? I don't mean to be, honest. I'm quite sure that Geoff would take this all in his stride and think it a quite normal way for life to be. I, meanwhile, say to myself "it doesn't need to be like this!" A tthe moment I could write letters to the CEOs of BT, of Party Gaming and of Hitachi to bemoan the damage that they are doing to their brand image because of sheer incompetence that would not cost that much to fix. But what's the point, because EVERYONE is useless these days. So much so that when you get a rare exception (Kwik-Fit, anyone?) people talk about it in words of hushed surprise. Surely, modern life DOES NOT HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS.
And I just want to get away from all this aggravation, all the time, with modern service. People are crap when it comes to writing manuals, polite but inefficient when it comes to service, useless when it comes to doing things in a timely fashion and incompetent when they try,and I'm fed up with it. But, like the priest in The Power And The Glory, I feel trapped in this hell that consumerism has created. I hate it, I hate it with a passion, and I desperately want to throw it all out of the window, pack up and leave behind the cuntishness that is the modern world. But, like the priest in The Power and the Glory, I don't leave. I stay, trapped.
Today's "miserable old git" and/or "grumpy old man" is aimed at Hitachi Europe, on two fronts. Incompetence but friendliness is reserved for Curry's Digital.
I bought a Hitachi AX-M13 something something something yesterday, and I got round to putting it together today. On the box it claims to be a 30 watts per channel micro hi-fi with a seaparte amplifier, that also plays MP3s, is a digital radio and can connect to your MP3 player via a USB port at the front.
Three hours and one round trip to Curry's Digital (which, for want of familiarity, I will henceforth call Dixon's) later, I've still no idea if it will play MP3 discs, and the USB connection remains stubbornly inoperative. But that, overall, is ok. Because I finally got the digital radio working.
I'm still vaguely bemused by the Hitachi instruction book, and by the way the radio works. If you are in FM, you press the tune up, the search takes place, until a station is found, at which point it stops. That's what the instruction manual tells you to do under the FM section. And that's what you do on most push-button radios.
Under the DAB section, it tells you... nothing. And there's no contact details for Hitachi either. The "troubleshooting" section covers a few simple points but nothing that is likely to occur.
Anyway, I ran the auto-scan, and ended up with Chill. I pressed the tuner upwards button and it rotated through all the stations, but when I stopped, it returned to Chill (unlike in FM, where it stayed on the channel found). I tried the manual tune up button and the "go up one channel" button, which just returned the line "P2 is empty". Hmm, I thought. Faulty aerial?
I tried to make sure that the aerial was correctly fitted, only to find that I couldn't remove it. At this point, everything went to "no signal".
What, I ask, would your conclusion be? By this time I'd reached a Hakallah stage that necessitated a return to Dixon's, who willingly replaced the by now somewhat damaged item. Well, first of all a youngster talked about "boosters", then a regular guy said "no, radios don't have boosters. And when I told him that my other DAB Radio worked fine, he accepted that the aerial might be faulty. A replacement item was brought round, and I returned home.
Second time around, and after an hour of the same "Chill Only" problem, I looked up the web. Hitachi's offerings make no mention of this model, but they did have another Digital Radio, with a pdf of instructions. It said that you tune to the desired channel, and then press the "select" button.
Hmm, I wondered, does my remote have a "select" button? Well, yes, it does, although it's cunningly diguised as the "play" button. So, what you have to do for Digital to tune to a new station is completely different from what you do to tune to a station under FM. With digital channels, you hold down the tune up button, and then when it gets to the station you want, you have to press the "play" button to select it. And Hitachi makes no mention of this anywhere in the instruction booklet. How many people, I wonder, have this model, forever glued to Chill FM, blindly asuming that they are in an area of poor reception. So, GOM mode today is HITACHI YOU SUCK. Oh, and you've wasted my entire Saturday afternoon, TYVM you shitbags.
Oh, and I tried the USB to play my Rio Karma. Result, "no USB" message. Then I tried it to play my Zen. Result, "no USB message". I assume that there ARE MP3 players with which this heap of fucking junk works, but I don't own any of them.
On the plus side, as a CD player it's great, and the sound quality is excellent. What a pity that the manual writers are absolute idiots. Then again, what do you expect.
It's quite possible that my MP3 players do work with the Hitachi and, like with the non-existent instructions on how to get the DAB Radio to work, it requires some cunning button pressing in an obscure combination.
What pisses me off is that a 20-page manual could quite easily cover these matters if any effort was put into manual writing. But Page one is a drawing of the device, and page 2 is blank. Pages 3 and 4 contain the normal Do's and Dont's (and, yes, those apostrophes are correct) like "Don't listen to headphones at high volume, as such use can permanently damage your hearing" and helpful things like "consult your dealer", for which, read "but whatever you do don't consult us, and we won't give you any contact details even if you felt like trying".
You then get the bits on putting the machine together, and things like "how to install the batteries in the remote". Apparently, "when the batteries are exhausted, the remote control can no longer operate the system". Yes, this is the shit that they put in.
Stopping off only to get another "be sure to turn the volume down before using headphones", we then get "Listening to radio broadcasts". Half a page of this, none of which tells you how to listen to radio broadcasts. It tells you how to do the autoscan, and what will happen if no stations can be found, but not how to listen to the radio.
You then get told how to set the clock, on which a page is spent. The FM tuning bit is quite useful. So there's an obvious conclusion to be drawn, isn't there? This product is an update of a product that used to be an FM radio only and CD player only. The digital facility has been added, but the instruction manual has only been rewritten hurriedly. Hitachi, a donkey company.
Oh, and the USB option is a new addition too, probably a more recent one, because the instruictions on this are four lines long. Yes, a page and a half on seting a clock, and four lines on using a quite important function. Then there's a whole page on setting the sleep timer and the "daily on" timer.
What is it with those sleep timers on HiFi systems? Does anyone use such timer thingiess except with a bedisde radio?
Then you get advice on handling a CD, in case you have just time-travelled from the stone age.
There are six "trouble-shooting" points, eery one of which is about as useless as one could expect. Any problems? Consult a qualified person, such as your dealer", for service.
Then there's a couple of blank pages again, where some contact details would have been nice.
Luckily, I found that Hitach in Europe is in Maidenhead, part of the Direct Media Group. Perhaps they might want to think about compiling a decent manual.
You see what I mean about grumpy old man mode? I don't mean to be, honest. I'm quite sure that Geoff would take this all in his stride and think it a quite normal way for life to be. I, meanwhile, say to myself "it doesn't need to be like this!" A tthe moment I could write letters to the CEOs of BT, of Party Gaming and of Hitachi to bemoan the damage that they are doing to their brand image because of sheer incompetence that would not cost that much to fix. But what's the point, because EVERYONE is useless these days. So much so that when you get a rare exception (Kwik-Fit, anyone?) people talk about it in words of hushed surprise. Surely, modern life DOES NOT HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS.
And I just want to get away from all this aggravation, all the time, with modern service. People are crap when it comes to writing manuals, polite but inefficient when it comes to service, useless when it comes to doing things in a timely fashion and incompetent when they try,and I'm fed up with it. But, like the priest in The Power And The Glory, I feel trapped in this hell that consumerism has created. I hate it, I hate it with a passion, and I desperately want to throw it all out of the window, pack up and leave behind the cuntishness that is the modern world. But, like the priest in The Power and the Glory, I don't leave. I stay, trapped.
