Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater I hate Toshiba...

Well, one month after my 1 year warranty is up on my Toshiba HD-A20, the player stops outputting sound, it has been on and off for the past 5 months, and now, there is no sound at all from movies.

Buying another HD DVD player is out of the question (even though I can get an A2 on ebay for <$50, whats the point?). So should I be diving into blu-ray players now? Or waste more money on a dated DVD technology machine? Sheesh.

Robb:
There are probably so many HD-DVD players out there that people are looking to sell, I'd say if you can pick one up really cheap, and you have lots of titles...why not?

Though I think if I were to sell my HD-DVD player, I'd probably only ask $30...not $50!

Mark,

I only have 6 titles...is that enough to justify it? I haven't decided yet... All the bourne movies, Transformers, Stardust (for the wife), and Blood Diamond...

I am thinking Bluray might be the way to go..damn, I didn't think I would have to face this decision this soon!

6 titles might not be enough to justify a new HDDVD. Since I needed a Blu-ray drive for my computer (it's a job-related thing), I went with the LG combo reader. Then, with AnyDVD HD, I am slowly copying (don't tell anyone!) all my HD-DVD disks to protect the content (there are lots of software readers than can then play them) in case my A30 fails.

I feel your pain, at the moment I have a hatred for Sharp. Damn tv is less than 2 years old and needs repair.

Eric, are you able to transcode the HD- DVD titles and burn to a BR disc? I haven't looked into whether or not Slysoft was doing anything like that.

Make me an offer on my A35 and about 200 HD/DVD's.

And you think that YOU hate Toshiba..........

Right now, I doubt it (using AnyDVD, at least). Maybe some transcoder will support doing that before long. It's a nice niche market.

I will never purchase a Toshiba product again. My last frustration with them involves a 32" Flat Screen (tube) HDTV we purchased 5 years ago for $1600+. Some of you may remember my thread when one day the picture stopped, but still had audio.

Turned out we had to pay about $30 to have it looked at by American TV and Electronics. Found out the part to fix it was only $40, that is the good news. The bad news is Toshiba only holds parts for 5 years, then your SOL. We could not even find an aftermarket or refurbished piece. So the TV was sent to the scrapyard and crushed. So long Toshiba.

I hate Toshiba too!! I had a 42" Plasma TV for 13 months then the power supply board went bad. I payed $40 for a repair technician to inform me that the part would cost $500. When I called Toshiba to complain they said "should have purchased the extended warranty sir". I will never again purchase a Toshiba product. I bought a Sony LCD and I'm real happy now.

I've had more frustration from Sony products, but then I've owned a lot more Sony products. I think you'll find that both companies are too big to have Axiom-like customer service.

I did buy a 5-year warranty on my replacement SXRD set after all of the trouble with my first one. I'm glad I did, as this one is developing the same kind of yellowing of the corner. It's not noticeable when I'm watching movies, but on certain static screens it's pretty obvious. I'll wait until it gets a bit worse before I call customer service and have to do without my TV for a little while. Maybe after they fail to fix it 4 or so times in a row again I'll be able to get another replacement.

I hear you, Hutzal. Have you contacted Toshiba to see if they'll help?

I have a Toshiba 65" 1080p HDTV and the Toshiba SD9200 DVD-Audio player. Love them both. The SD9200 has been plugging along for many years now.

G'luck to you.

Dude (yes, I said "dude"), you've known about the problem while there was still 4 months left on the warranty and now it is Toshiba's fault that you didn't send it in? I'm confused...

I hate Freezer Fur.

In my experience with things like this, "if it ain't broke, the vendor won't fix it."

i.e. you call and say "I'm having this intermittent problem," and they say, "Oh, so it works some or most of the time?"

You: "Well, yes, it does."
Them: "Ok, well, sounds like you're fine then."

Not sure if Rob went through this, but I did awhile back with a Panasonic TV. After a few more phone calls they caved in, but cracking the first wall of resistance wasn't easy.

I guess I've never had that problem. My system failures seem to be "all or none" and usually the failures are entire system or component failures, not intermittent very often. My experience is that people are generally reasonable when it comes to warranty issues. They don't do much troubleshooting and just give you an RMA to send it back and then they send you a refirb unit. Still, I would have at least reported it.

Hutzal, I feel your pain, and I didn't mean to poke you with a stick when you are already black and blue from this.

I had contacted Toshiba in the past about another problem with this player and they weren't a big help at all, unless the player doesn't work at all, they don't really do anything. mdrew...sorry, no offer for you

What sucks is that the A20 was my DVD player to for upconverting....now I can't even play DVDs...

Just curious, but you say no sound from movies. Does that mean you get sound from CDs? Also, did you try the optical output instead of HDMI? Just curious.

Look on the bright side, now that you are in the U.S. you can take advantage of the Black Friday deals and get a Blu-ray player cheap.

A guy that I work with says that when he has some electronic device that is failing, but hasn't totally failed, he will send some electricity through it and fry it. Seems risky to me. I would think that they would try to put it back on the consumer that it was zapped by lightning or something, but he claims to have done this "many" times in the past.

I think that he just does it to try to get a replacement of a device right before the warranty is up. He said to me, "I'd just take a wall-wart style power box and connect it in through one of the audio jacks to send 120v through a low volt area and fry the sucker."

Anyway, enough of that diversion...

Just send me your HD-DVDs and buy yourself a Blu-Ray.

We've always been lucky, my wife bought a car several years ago that had to have the complete a/c system replaced ... less than a hundred miles to go before the factory warranty ran out.

Oops, wrong forum.

I'm still getting firmware updates from Toshiba for our obsolete A2, I'll have to go dust off the player and load 'em up one of these days.

CV,

I tried optical and analog out. No sound on movies, CDs work fine tho.

Weird. That does suck.

Robb, have you tried the 'smack it a few times' repair philosophy? If nothing else, just to get some revenge on it.

If all else fails the sledge hammer takes care of the problem permanently.

Looks like it may be that time Robb...

As much as I like the Bluray player I got I just can't get it out of my head this whole Bluray thing is gonna be like "Laserdiscs" - and fizzle out.
Maybe it's just being a past Beta and Laser person that makes me feel this way.
- Scott

Personal opinion, but they seem to already have surpassed the laserdisc's level of fad at the time. But maybe that's because I'm heavily invested in Blu-Ray.

The Blu-Ray is alright for the visuals and in my estimation will be around for quite some time, but I don't know that I'm completely sold on replacing a perfectly good 7.1 receiver to get the HD audio formats I keep reading about.

Take for instance, the John Mayer 'Where The Lights Is' BR disc has a great BR picture and even on my old receiver an awesome sound but I can't help to think that probably has more to do with the mixing of the disc rather than what audio format it's being played on.

Rick, many of the BR discs have a higher bit rate on the DD tracks so they should still sound better than dvd's, but you won't have to invest alot to get a better receiver to handle TrueHD etc. $400-$500 looks to be about the right price range.

I agree completely Rick! I was just lucky enough, maybe it was planning ahead, but my receiver has 7.1 analog in, so it was just a matter of getting the right Blu-Ray player that could do all of the HD audio decoding and send it to my receiver via analog.

I would really be struggling to justify a new receiver right now if I didn't have the analog option just to get the HD audio. I hear that it is better, but I have a hard time replacing something that I think works great right now so that I have some functionality that I haven't heard first hand and I am not sure, personally, if it is worth the cost to get a "lesser quality" receiver than my current one, but that has the HDMI and decoders.

But one thing that BR will allow is the storage space. So now, more and more mixers will start taking advantage of lossless codecs or PCM. That BR disc was pretty incredible sounding by the way.

For me, BR is more about the picture right now than the sound. Don't get me wrong, they sound great, but the difference in sound between the (well) compressed tracks and uncompressed is much more subtle than the immediate "jump off your screen" difference in picture quality.

I'm probably more sensitive to this than average because I have a big projection screen on which SD-DVDs look quite poor stretched to that size.

I have tried the "smack" it technique, it is important to make sure that the smacking comes from the forearm, not the wrist, or injury may occur.

The smack didn't help at all, but it did relieve me of some frustration I will be adding a bluray player this friday...I just don't know when or where I will get getting it, I am keeping a strict eye on Amazon.com

I think you are right on the money. The audio difference I have seen with HD-DVD pales in comparison to the picture quality improvement over SD-DVD.

Does anyone else think the disc format might be dead for HD content? I think SD_DVD's will be around for a while as picture and sound are very good and everyone has at least a couple around the house. I can't help but think buying movies online and keeping them on a computer will be the wave of the future. That or just stream what you want to your tv from the same type of provider. In that sense, there would be no reason to own the disc.

Greg

Not to mention there are still way more SD TV's out there, which makes owning a high def disc player pointless.People like to own things, streaming could work as long as people can save it for future use for free or the cost to watch a streamed movie is in the dollar per viewing range and the movie can be watched when ever the mood suits the viewer. However, there are still many people that are not computer savvy enough to do streaming from a PC, so this will keep the dvd alive. I think streaming could mean the slow start to BR is going to continue or kill it unless player prices can come down to meet SD dvd player prices prices making it a no brainer as to which type of system to buy the next time, which is what I think Sony is shooting for. I think if BR player prices drop below $100 the BR system will become the next system, at least for awhile, especially if they can convince the music industry to move away from cd to BR as well. I think that is a huge leap, but too few people out there care about SQ and features with their music and are content with 128K downloads.

I think it'll be awhile before BR is overtaken by streaming. The bandwidth required isn't quite there yet to make streaming 1080p a reality for the masses. (you can do it, but it's slow and subject to long buffering times in advance of watching)

It'll definitely get there, but I believe BR will fill the void in the market in the meantime.

Jason