Back in March I told you that Emotiva promised to send me a new USP‑1 stereo pre-amplifier after their support team had me undertake a wild-goose-chase, and then abandoned me after their ideas failed. Catch up with my first and second posts on this issue.

I received the replacement pre-amp and it works just fine. I was interested to note that the invoice indicates that the directive to ship me a replacement came directly from the company’s VP/CTO.

An article on hometheater.com called “Emotiva: Good Deal or the Real Deal?” reminded me of this unfortunate affair. In particular, this jumped out at me:

Another contributor to the company’s recent success has been a customer-first philosophy…

The author goes on to explain how the company made good on a component they released before they should have. The author doesn’t ever talk about service and support to individual customers, but you can imagine how the quote upset me.

It’s funny too, because a number of Emotiva’s new products are more than a little interesting to me. Their new XPR amps look like they kick ass, though I expect my XPA‑5 to last a long time. The XMC‑1 home-theatre processor looks amazing, and a steal for the $1499 price-tag. It’s especially tempting because they offer a 40% discount on the next generation processor when you buy a current processor. A processor with similar features and capabilities would sell for $3000 – $4000, and I could get it for $900, but even that ridiculous discount isn’t enough to put my hesitation aside.

No matter how good the product is, if the post-sale service sucks, the product means nothing if it ever fails. And they do fail.

It’s a damned shame that all their work means so little because the service is poor. At least mine was.