How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experience? Just like every retailer has embraced usury with their credit card programs, every technology company has decided they are in the data harvesting business. I’m so over it.
Not much. Buy used. Buying new stereo equipment is an activity of the wealthy. Everywhere I've ever lived, CraigsList is overrun with excellent used speakers and receivers at reasonable prices.
I won't inundate you with brand-flexing, but I'll say I'm very happy with my home theater system. 4K OLED TV, big ol' tower speakers, and a pretty nice home theater unit. All from reputable brands. All used. Under $400 all together. No shitware.
Get a Yamaha [0], NAD [1], Rotel [2]?
I would have adamantly said AKAI, but they are no more.
[0]: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/hifi_components...
[1]: https://nadelectronics.com/product/c-3050-stereophonic-ampli...
Edit: Immediately after posting this I scrolled down and saw "The C 3050’s industrial design was inspired by the NAD 3030 Stereophonic Amplifier, a 1970s classic" which explains the look!
isn't like this our goal here??? I mean we are comment on YC site that produce startup aiming just that
Generally though, consumers have already spoken with their wallets on this topic and they have told many thousands of doe-eyed founders loud and clear: “we will happily sacrifice our time and privacy to save a $3, bring on the ads”
Hence why YC focuses on B2B Saas for B2B Saas companies who sell to other B2B Saas companies.
NO! I've been here long enough to remember PG saying to build something people WANT. YC has become less about technical founders building an MVP and more about the investors finding something they can make money from. The later often depends on "monetization" which has become the driver of enshitification, which is precisely the opposite of what people want and the antithesis of what YC once was.
Abusing customers as a business model should not be legal. It's not ethical to begin with, actually, and applauding this practice is interesting.
I use a Frame and don't have any of the issues you describe in the slightest.
The power button turns the TV on with a 0.5 second animation, and immediately I see the Roku interface with no popups or Samsung branding or anything.
Probably the ONLY complaint is that by default my washing machine puts an alert on the TV every time it's finished.
I would probably find the setting to turn it off but honestly part of me finds it very cool for my washer to creep onto the TV because it knows I'm watching.
EDIT: maybe you are using wifi? It's the only thing I can think might be different in my setup. Try running RJ45 and see what happens? All I can say is Works On My Machine unless you add some details
On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.
Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.
...I want it.
For me, I reckon less than 5k overall. JVC DLA-X5000 projector, Yamaha A1020 receiver, Focal Aria 936 speakers, SVS SB1000 sub, Raspberry Pi 2 with Kodi on it, a NAS with 16TiB of storage and gigabit networking to connect it all. All the AV stuff second hand, of course. No load times, no ads, just a system that works for me.
I do not accept technology into my life unless it works for me. If the latest nK formats and 1000 channel surround doesn't work without equipment that works for someone else than I'll never have it in my home. Simple as that. I'll read a book instead.
Back in the mid 80s I spent way more than was sensible and bought myself seperate NAD pre/power amps, Boston Acoustic Speakers, and a Rega turntable for my birthday. I not only still have and use all that gear, but have since bought more of the same brands 2nd hand mostly from the same era, so I now have 5.1 surround in my lounge room, and stereo amp/speaker sets in my kitchen, office, bedroom, and guest bedroom - all NAD/Boston Acoustic, and all capable of doing Apple AirPlay via Apple TV or old Airport Expresses.
Vintage hifi is great. You will probably need to become the sort of person who can replace all the electrolytic capacitors in your amps and speakers crossovers, or at least know someone who can. And you'll become the sort of person who'll hunt the internet for someone who can ship you replacement drivers for your speakers, styluses and drive belts for your turntable, and hifi grade capacitors (and you'll probably stock pile all of those those). It's at least partially a hobby instead of just appliances you own.
The only issue is volume control, due to not having a remote for lazier folk. I can control it digitally but don't like "shaving" off bits to control volume.
Chinese copies + Amazon = flood of shit
It takes years to design, test, build prototypes, measure, re-design, re-build, calibrate, certify and produce a good hifi audio amp. That means you start your product journey with $500k in debt and unless you can show how you're going to sell enough units to recover this, your project is dead before it ever started. You typically need to sell at 8x of your real costs, because shipping companies, import agents, wholesalers and retailers all want (and need) their margins. If I expect to sell 2,000 units per month (which is A LOT already) for 2 years, then I need to add about $10 to my costs per unit to recover the R&D expenses. And that means as long as Amazon is happy to turn a blind eye on IP-infringing blatantly obvious clones that typically even re-use my product images or slogans or brand names ... then my "original" product will be undercut by $10x8 = $80 in price by Chinese clones. They don't have R&D to recoup because the can just buy my product, x-ray the PCB, and then make duplicates. And trying to get Amazon to follow the law is like playing expensive whack-a-mole with lawyers. It won't help to recover money.
That means as the manufacturer, I have exactly 1 way left to recover R&D expenses:
I lock down the software. And then I either shove ads in your face, or I bully you into a subscription. Or if the ads pay too little, both.
I hate the situation as much as you do, but I also see no better way forward. Nowadays, you need to plan for the flood of shitty clones on Amazon a week after launch. (Or in some cases, even before the original product clears import customs.) And that means you treat hardware as cheap and disposable, because your competitors do that and unless you join them, you're at a huge market disadvantage, because the average customer cannot tell the difference between a low-quality and a high-quality capacitor. (And Amazon doesn't care.)
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/selfie-stick-iphone-case-gets...
(And please note that these guys even had US patents on the product. Didn't help them, though.)
Too much effort when they can just go to the company making them and get cheaply made copies :)
Disclaimer: I have booth systems in parallel and I feel disgusted and disappointed every time I have to use the Sonos system now.
Beyond the speaker and amplifier of your choice (both dumb! or dumbed down) a few hundreds of USD and couple of weeks or months of learning and tinkering with low cost hardware and open source software for HiFi use. Some Raspberry Pis and matching DAC allowed me to have a very decent experience I needed (around KEF speakers). There were dead-ends, confusions, restarts, dubious or closed down solutions offered but you will rely moslty (not completely) on your own in the end if done right, and not exposed to the mercy of ruthless conglomerate assoles that much.
Projector (Optoma laser) - $1200
110" powered retractable projector screen - $100
Mid tier PC - $600
DAC (Schiit modi 2) - $180
Amp (Behringer A500) - $100
SVS prime towers - $1000
SVS Sub - $750
All of my music is running off Jellyfin. I have a turntable that barely gets used but that's because I don't have enough space for it to keep it out of the reach/ damage radius of my kids.
You can of course do this for much less if you don't spend 2 grand on the audio part.
Why on earth do you say that? :))) I got a nice Samsung 12" tablet, and a nice Samsung (work) smartphone. After 20-30mins of disabling bloat/crap-ware their batteries last a week on stand-by.
My TV is just a rather basic chinese 75" TCL, and I have absolutely 0 zilch ads anywhere apart from actual Google products (youtube of course but thats a terrible experience anywhere without ublock origin or similar, and OS showing on the background in main menu ads for their paid movies - the place I spend maybe 3s during start if at all and they don't even look like ads just background). If I launch straight ie netflix 0 nanoseconds spent seeing ads. If I play from USB there is nothing. And this is rock bottom chinese stuff.
Turning on TV which is in sleep mode is like 2s max, another 2s and soundbar is on automatically via eArc.
I used to have B&W towers with Pioneer receiver (bought for peanuts, older tech sounds 100% as new one) but then I realized they add friction to whole experience and I prefer a small notch lower sound quality to convenience and surround. Samsung soundbar with that TV does that 100%. Apart from playing music only I don't even notice the difference.
Is this maybe region specific behavior? I live in Switzerland, US consumers are widely known to accept way more ads than other western countries, plus there is a lot of wealth in that single market.
Have a 10TB movie collection on an external HDD (mostly 1080p x265 rips and few 4K ones) but its less convenient and I have to download new stuff myself. Plus I love standup collection Netflix has.
Total price cca 1.5 years ago - cca 1700$ and a proper cinema experience.
What does this mean?
Sure, there is some boot up time to warm everything up, but there are no ads and no user agreements etc on mid to high end systems.
Even my entry level system (denon avr, lg c1 oled, appletv4k and ugoos as media players) does not take more then 10 seconds from totally off to showing the menu / plex interface, and no user agreement popups or ads
My system is very similar to yours. I’ve got a UHD player, XBox, Plex Server, and a half-dozen retro gaming systems in the mix. But apparently I'm not as patient as you (and others that responded) are.
I find 10 seconds to be intolerable and unnecessary. I’m old enough to have been spoiled by the analog world where power meant you were ready.
Not only is the time-to-wait painful, occasionally the HDMI handshake fails or the TV powered on quicker than the receiver’s signal was output and its input selection “picks” the wrong input or wrong display settings. So now you have to consider the order you’re powering things up, because the TV is “smart” and if you tell it to choose an input that isn’t ready, it’ll self-select one it thinks is ready.
And if I’m using HDMI-ARC, which I frequently do when using an over-the-air signal, if the TV powers on sooner than the receiver, the TV falls back to its own speakers. So now I’m stuck navigating the TV menu to get the audio through my SVS speakers instead of the ones in the TV.
Occasionally my TV has an “update” and then its apps have updates and then the update presents a new “user agreement” with all the data harvesting options pre-selected. If I don’t use my system frequently, two of the devices in the chain may want to update!
And after all that, if I’m watching physical media I then have to wait for the disc to be read and navigate through forced ads or trailers or piracy warnings. If they aren’t forced, I still have to intervene to skip them and get to the menu. But don’t select anything too fast on the menu! It has its own animations it wants you to watch before it will show you what options you have.
And all of that whining doesn’t even cover the wasteland of options available to remote control and make sense of the Rube-Goldberg AV system. The best option (Logitech Harmony) bailed leaving consumers with nothing but the Chinese schlock that hollowed out the market in the first place.
No Bloatware.
But! There are relatively few home theater receiver makers, and the Denon/Marantz siblings have been a big chunk of them for decades.
(Sony, Yamaha, Onkyo, Denon. Nobody else covers the low and mid cost market.)
That role is no longer sensible when used with smart TVs/Apple TV boxes/Android TV boxes.
As a result, traditional receivers are relegated to be being audio decoders and amplifiers. Honestly, I think there's already more manufactured and lying around than the world really needs. It was inevitable that a few product lines would be consolidated.
I really really wish there were digital audio decoder/processors available. It sucks so bad that you either buy a semi affordable consumer amplifier with 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos out and ok amplification, or if you want to step up you need a $4000+ processor whose only real job is decoding Dolby formats & turning them into analog outs for amplification. And there's almost no market, just a couple odd products like Emotiva's XMC-2: https://emotiva.com/products/xmc-2-plus-16-channel-9-1-6-dis...
Opener standards like DTS would hopefully have some remedy here but if the source material isn't available it hardly matters. Hoping for actual open standards Immersive Audio Model and Format (iamf) and the Eclipsa Audio Format profiles atop that maybe some day give us good spatial audio that an rpi and multichannel sound out board can help us free ourselves from this vile civilization-scale Dolby tarpit with. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/introducing-eclips...
90+% of the things people complain about would no longer be a problem if they got a traditional A/V receiver, plugged all their sources such as streaming boxes and game consoles into the receiver, and just used the smart TV as a monitor (and as a tuner if they watch OTA television).
Until that is no longer the case there will be a role for traditional A/V receivers.
We're about five years away from "no remotes" anymore, imo. As it is I only need to find the TV remote when something goes really wonky - and even then I can reset it by using the smart app to power cycle the outlet ;)
I have a HomePod in my living room and it gets used, but I also have a traditional receiver hooked up to my external speakers, with a turntable and CD player plugged into the receiver.
Yes at first glance a TV does the switching, and the rest. But a modern receiver can be better. Better switching, better ability to handle multiple speakers ( particularly for Dolby Atmos ) including Room EQ. Alot of TVs only have 2 HDMI ports with all the latest features.
Speaking only anecdotally, when I was in my 20s, I bought a Sony "home theatre in a box" which included receiver, small subwoofer, and small satellite speakers. Over time, I upgraded to an Onkyo reciever and Polk center, surrounds, and subwoofer.
But... then I decided I wanted a more minimal look, and switched to a JBL sound bar + subwoofer, which has detachable surrounds -- but I almost never utilize them.
For sure, the sound is nothing compared to what I had before, but I'm mostly OK with it. All that to say, how popular are sound bars, and how popular are dedicated receivers?
I suspect something like 80% of people use the TV, and of those who upgrade, use a soundbar, maybe.
And even those with a dedicated theatre room, probably have other TVs that are just TV audio.
I'd agree with others, speakers aren't that concerning. There are niche speaker manufacturers and used or refurbished is still a good option. To be honest, I'd also look to the used market if I where to replace my amp.
Personally I don't have anything against Samsung, but I doubt they'll be a good steward of those brands. Corporate interest and niche high quality audio seems to at opposite ends of the spectrum. I could be wrong, Sony makes nice stuff, maybe Samsung will as well.
Now, whether that means anything when 99% of everything made for watching is just playing in the background while you're reading HN on your phone is debatable. Still wouldn't trade the setup even if I'm watching one movie per month. (I'm not even close to that high of a number...)
Given Samsung’s track record with enshittification and support timelines I’m worried that this acquisition means all that will be going away, which is a shame. Guess I’ll be looking at Sony and Yamaha models instead going forward.
Denon and Marantz are arguably the best AVR manufacturers. It’ll be interesting to see what Samsung does with them. The home theater market is pretty outdated compared to other areas of audio. Car audio, soundbars, and professional systems mostly use active speakers and tightly integrated setups. Meanwhile, home theater is still stuck with passive speakers and a component-based approach.
While some might see this as a monopoly concern, there's a chance Samsung could use its combined brands to modernize home audio. Imagine a fully wireless, all-in-one home theater system with active speakers and centralized room correction. That could be a real step forward.
The problem with wireless speakers is you can't really stream at a high enough bitrate to them to make for decent audio. Plus to really work, they need a plug nearby.
People without a proper room really can't enjoy surround sound which is a shame. There's this whole world of high end home theater equipment most people never get a chance to hear.
I try to show everyone my theater room to get more people excited. Several friends have run out and bought setups after hearing it. It's not too hard to run wires and mount speakers. I genuinely think most people just don't know what they are missing.
Most people don’t have theater rooms, and they don’t want their living room to look like one.
Most people who hear a Samsung q990x series soundbar are super excited too. I think you overestimate how much better a dedicated speaker setup is, especially if we are talking 5.1.
Think pre-GFC peak Best Buy & the old CompUSA/Circuit City chains of the past or even Apple before they captured every other product category and actually had entire tables of headphone and speaker brands.
It strikes me as very hard for any new brand to come about in this environment if they aren't already big enough to have their own storefront. As you are generally left shopping online by price (DTC / China alphabet soup branded sop on AMZN) or by known brand (I'll just get a Sony / Apple / Sonos / Bose).
In my home city, we had several electronics retailers who sold every kind of component stereo equipment, including car stereo and whatnot. So I could literally walk into a store and see a huge gamut of dual-deck cassette recorders, or turntables, or amplifiers, receivers, etc. And they were all set up for customer demo. It was fantastic.
When the time came for me to shop for a CD audio player, I pre-purchased a few CDs to listen to for the demos. That was a great move; the place where I went for "auditions" had a dedicated listening room just chock-a-block with equipment that could be switched into whatever speaker system fit my home setup. And so in exactly one stop at a retail outlet, I was able to listen to that CD through several diverse systems, make a final purchase decision, and walk out of there with my favorite 7-disc CD changer, which served well for about 15 years after that.
The other problem is walmart with the generic stuff is good enough for most even though it is measurably bad, in a cheap but measurably bad listening environment - but they can thereby compete with online sales. That and a lot of expensive stuff is measurably no better than the "our best" walmark junk and so if you do find such a store there is no guarantee they are not pushing you overprice junk instead of the good stuff.
It goes back to the old tale of "being too poor to buy cheap boots" that US consumerism has forgotten. We are addicted to cheap stuff, not good value stuff. Cheap is not always good value.
There are lots of good people left at B&W. If they are afforded the autonomy they deserve, everything will be fine. If not…I guess we’ll see.
Only time will tell.
"Back in the day", home theatre receivers made sense when you wanted Radio + CD inputs in addition to the TV input. But radio and CD players are gone. There is just TV. Even when I do audio, I run it through the TV.
Thus why do you need a separate box? It just seems like a waste.
Instead everyone these days are just attaching their speaker systems directly to the TV.
And with wireless speakers, e.g. Sonos and similar systems, a centralized audio amplifier just doesn't make sense at all.
So all that is left is ultra-high end applications and there are few of those.
The second issue is what you described, the mixing is just bad, sound effects and music are much louder than dialog making it impossible to comprehend without subtitles.
For the past 15 years, I have used the same cheap combo of soundbar+subwoofer (Sony but anything goes) and it's perfect for everything I throw at it. The sound is equivalent to what I remember on those expensive sets, it's only $250, and I don't spend my whole time in front of the TV listening to high-quality remasters of classical concerts while smoking a cigar.
The high-end brands have failed to recognize that for most people a decent set of cheap speakers is equivalent to a cinema experience. They should have studied that instead of focusing on incomprehensible technical values and numbers. The software industry is guilty of this too.
That cacophony was considered quality music?
Marantz gear in particular is great, and Samsung buying them seems really unfortunate. Might be better than some private equity randos though.
The sound quality of modern TV is absymal. The digital compression does play its part, but the speakers and the case are crap.
I think the overall experience with the modern setup is worse in every way than 20 years ago with the exception of picture quality since we have 4K now. (Of course mostly we watch heavily compressed streaming video). 20 years ago I had a 5.1 system and would watch DVDs. The sound was vastly better than TV speakers/soundbar, compression was lower on the video despite being SD. By 15 years ago this was no longer true with a Blue Ray player of course, everything was better. My setup back then even had an audio compressor ("dynamic range adjustment") so you could actually hear the dialog when you needed to turn the volume down at night. No need to use subtitles!
But the old setup doesn't make sense anymore either as you would have had to keep replacing the receiver a bunch of times for no good reason as AV standards changed.
I got rid of my old setup at some point. I have a new system in another room that doesn't do video at all. It's just stereo with a CD player, a Turntable, a digital media player (doesn't get used much) and a Bluetooth input for streaming.
You could have easily kept that setup with the same level of soundquality the whole time - assuming nothing breaks.
I think large 5.1 just went out of fashion due to the size and cable requirements and the fact that soundbars became good enough.
I can definitively tell you that sound bars to not come anywhere close to the quality of what I have, and at a decent price too (the entire audio setup cost less than my OLED tv).
I think most people are never exposed to real home theater audio so they don't know what they are missing. Similar with high end stereo audio these days (which I also have).
Every time I show Top Gun Maverick in my theater room to a friend, they want to go out and buy a real setup. Several have. It sounds better than an actual theater plus I get to lounge on my couch with my dog.
I was sort of one of those people, with a soundbar, because it was easy and convenient. The soundbar came with a wireless subwoofer, and that solved the problem of running wires across my living room.
But, I had a gifted B&W 5.1 system with powered sub collecting dust out in my garage for a long time. I recently made the push to dust it all off and buy a receiver to power it, replacing the soundbar+sub we had been using for years.
The difference is really night and day. The soundbar just never got loud enough for when I wanted to crank-it-up when playing music. It was good enough for watching most TV shows, but the sound we get now from a 5.1 movie is incredible in comparison.
I did the work to run completely flat speaker wires to the surround speakers, under the rug in our living room. It took some work to re-route wires and get power to where the receiver is, but it was well worth it.
The new system goes as loud as I can stand it with crystal-clarity all the way up to "11". The soundbar looks like a piece of junk in comparison and is now out in the garage collecting dust.
> So all that is left is ultra-high end applications and there are few of those.
(and yes, I am mostly in that tiny demographic)
Dr. Amar Bose donated the majority of his namesake company to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So technically, MIT now owns both McIntosh and Sonus faber, two of the biggest players in luxury audio. (MIT has non-voting shares of Bose, so although the university owns the majority of the company, it does not control business decisions.)
How many people hear B&W or Harman-Kardon and think "logo on my car's speakers" rather than "high end stereo gear?"
How many people hear "Mark Levinson" and think either "Lexus" or "who's Mark?"
I genuinely didn't know that there were still real, standalone speakers and head units made under half these brands that aren't whitelabeled Bluetooth detritus.
The RTi12 was easily the best floor standing speaker I've ever owned, potentially at any cost.
Also why don’t TVs and AVRs use display port instead of hdmi (license costs)?
If I'm at the computer and turn off the TV with the TV remote it turns off the monitor the majority of the time.
I wonder if Samsung will manage to make to so Denon and Marantz receivers will also sometimes turn off when you turn off a Samsung TV?
The TV remote will turn off the monitor even if I wrap the remote in a blanket which should block IR or hold it behind some blackout curtains.
Recently I was looking for a toaster. Target has a nice selection of toasters. Look down into the slots, and they are all exactly the same.
There were, at peak, only three different VCRs. All those brands used one of three standard mechanisms. But you could get a hundred different cases.
My recommendation is actually to buy a commercial toaster. It'll toast twice as fast and last for years. Downside is that it will probably look ugly. I've heard good things about Dualit too though.
(+) On the other hand if all you eat is white sliced pan, then go ahead and buy any €20 toaster. You're in luck, they were built for you.
One thing I noticed about commercial build quality: simplicity. No touch bullshit. Small LCD displays. Here's some buttons and maybe a rotating knob. knock yourself out.
Then Netflix, the race to the bottom in terms of bitstreams and portable devices happened.
Netflix delivers Dolby Atmos in bitrates that are indistinguishable from lossless audio. It's better, not worse.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250507182014/https://www.engad...
In case anyone need it, here's[0] Wikipedia list article for HTTP status codes(200, 404, etc.) "Too Many Requests" is 429.
Basically any time a market changes drastically you see older players consolidate. Too often that leads to one big collapse of the consolidated entity. We’ll see what happens in time.
Far too many bad Samsung experiences.
Multi-disk players, either stackable or the big rotating wheel kind, are also fun. Those can give you most of a day's audio if you like.
I’ve got an “Amana” heat pump. It’s really a Daikin, and is part for part compatible with Goodman, also owned by Diakin. But all the brands are sold to customers to create the illusion of choice. Maybe we could at least have a “real name” policy for companies and products.
Time to grab current equipment while you can. Go a little nicer than you would normally for longevity.
I have friends commenting that they have Samsung TVs infested with ads it did not have when they first purchased it.
I forsee a future where marantz amps have really annoying separate startup and shutdown songs and jingles for increments of volume obviously ascending and descending for increase and decrease in volume respectively with unavoidable long melodies for each power of ten, which of course can not be skipped or disabled by the user and also pause all ui inputs while being played causing the unit to grind to a halt if trying to change the volume too quickly and even causing the unit to crash as the melodies over lap and cause a buffer overflow… to be fixed never of course.
Even ignoring price, I can't think of a mainstream brand I consider worse from a quality perspective than Samsung. The only other brand I consider as bad is Sony, and that's more ideological than quality because of their shenanigans and contempt for their customers -- at least their hardware isn't almost across the board destined for the scrap heap. I've seen too many nearly new samsung appliances just die due to bad electronics and they want to charge nearly the cost of the appliance for a replacement circuit board.
On topic for audio -- I got a samsung receiver for $20 from the thrift store and while it sort of does the job of being an amplifier, everything else about it is horrible. Worst interface of any receiver I've used since the 80s, its easy to change a setting accidentally while being difficult to change it back, and it doesn't power back on after a power outage requiring me to manually press the (capacitive/touch) power button on it. Also that (TOUCH!) Power 'button' is right next to the volume knob so you accidentally touch it while changing the volume, shutting the receiver off. But booting it back up requires holding the (capacitive) button. A quick press makes it flash so you think it is booting but the joke is on you, you need to hold it. Also you have to hold it properly, because sometimes it simply fails to register so after holding it for a few seconds and it doesn't boot, you have to take your finger off and try again. It's a receiver and you can't even select an input -- you need to cycle through all of them one at a time. So the one connected to your TV starts blasting erectile dysfunction audio at boosted commercial volume through your speakers when you're just trying to switch to bluetooth so you can listen to some lo-fi. You can't even make this stuff up. It's a joke and I don't believe anyone involved cared one bit about making a decent product.
The fridge ice maker had to have been designed by a troll. One piece of ice every 10 seconds or so. It took a minute to fill a simple dinner glass!
Then the microwave handle just...fell off the door. In all my years of owning bottom of the barrel to top end brands, I didn't even realize it was possible. The repairman said it was common, but because of all the plastic, they had to replace the entire door as the handle wasn't serviceable.
Never again. Not even their phones.
I have a Samsung plasma TV from 10~15 years ago. The picture quality is and always was beautiful, I had to have the power supply replaced once, and the software experience is and always was terrible.
I eventually factory-reset the TV to make it forget my wifi credentials so it would stop interrupting me to claim my internet connection was down, when actually their update server was down. (I was trying to watch a DVD, so it would have been fine even if my internet was down!) Now it's just connected to a PC and I completely avoid the samsung software.
Also agree with you about Sony and their contempt for their customers. I went through 3-4 pairs of linkbuds because they kept failing in ~6 months. I loved the idea of the design ("open back" earbuds with a hole in them to allow in outside sound, instead of using microphones), but the build quality just wasn't there.
