Hello again all,

Just to add to the last few comments, when you have pretentions to be considered the best, or one of the best, in your chosen line you should remember that two things are critically important:
1. The quality of after sales service must be even better than the product, and speed of response is (perceived as) the best indicator of quality, and
2. A great deal of your sales is achieved through satisfied customers who act as 'free of charge' advertisers.

Last night we had a party at our home and people were absolutely stunned by how good the sound coming from ordinary CDs was. These are people whom Meridian should target as potential customers. I did not tell my guests how disappointed I had been with the service - in fact I did not mention at all that the 800 player could not read any of my DVDs. However somebody might have acted differently.

What made things even worse in my case was that I went through a lot of trouble to try and get the problem sorted out in good time. I even tried to call Meridian myself but discovered that unless you know somebody's direct number you cannot in fact speak to anybody. You are requested to leave a recorded message and they will get back to you. This I did, but no one called me back.

The final straw was the fact the I couldn't even get my second 800 to function. When everything is working as intended you sit back and enjoy tremendously but in my situation I suddenly did not understand nor wanted to understand why the latest configuration program would not communicate with an older version of a product. After all, we expect the latest windows office program to be backwards compatible with older versions, so why shouldn't Meridian have ensured the same compatibility?

My intention was not to cause Meridian or my dealer any trouble but at the same time I felt that nobody cared a great deal about the fact that an ardent fan and big investor in their products was not being looked after the way he should have been. I did not ask for priority, just what every customer should have expected of a top-brand product.