Insolvency

like it or not, guys, this is actually a legal question. and, before you kill all the lawyers, permit me, please, to offer some gratis (read:"rare") legal advice. under the laws of the usa, a manufacturer may impose "reasonable" conditions upon its warranty obligations, including a "registration" requirement of a "reasonable" nature within a "reasonable" period. some sellers, as supposed favors to their customers, retain warranty registration cards, usually for the purpose of falsely and fraudulently "extending" the warranty period. this may seem to be righteous to buyers but may, in fact, limit or obviate the warranty rights otherwise applicable. my advice is this: (1) if a manufacturer imposes warranty registration obligations, honor them; (2) a dealer's "lifetime" warranty is only as good as the lifetime of the dealer, not yours; (3) if you're in the same situation as slawney, explain your situation to the warrantor and pray that its got an ethical sense to honor your "warranty," irrespective of legal obligations to the contrary; and, (4) don't trust ANYONE to tell you that the terms of a warranty registration is "no big deal" and can be avoided. -kelly

Thank-you for the info Kelly. I guess I better read the fine print a little better in the future. Bob

Nice (and generous) post Cornfed. Craig

rcprince, esp. kelly, thanks for the expert advice, and one question. How does an insolvency sale work? Is it open to the public or only to trade professionals? Does it work wholesale or retail, like an auction or something else? Is the equipment sold at wholesale or best offer? Is most of the equipment returned to the distributors?
Re. the warranties. The equipment I bought from this store--Audiomeca CD Transport, Z-Systems digital preamp, NBS cables (with a supposed life-time warranty)--will hopefully last until the warranty expires. Whenever this dealer sold equipment, he always retained the warranty cards, actually took them out of the boxes before the customer got the equipment (I never saw a warranty card with anything I bought from him, and everything was new, at retail price). When confronted on this, he would say that he needed to keep the warranty information for his records "to see when the warranty ran out in case of necessary repair." I was always instructed to bring the equipment to him if it failed. I always thought: "what if I move to another city?" but shrugged aside the doubts so as not to cause a stir. He lost his authorized dealership status for many if not all of the lines he carried as things declined. Also, I used to trade in things with him and get cash-equivalent coupons or vouchers for later purchases. Thank god, I used them up recently, as these easily totalled into the thousands at times. Imagine having thousands of dollars in coupons for equipment from a shop that no longer exists! What was really uncanny was that he never talked about his financial troubles openly (even when he could not deliver a set of cables to me for 9 months). I think that his intense passion and curiosity about new equipment led him to buy more than he could sell. It used to be the best shop in town. Now the contents are being sold off on Monday.

Those mail-in warranty cards usually have one purpose. All those questions they sometimes ask are for gather marketing intelligence. Even a simple name and address is useful to marketing.