Hostility from manufacturers

As everyone has been saying, it depends on the company owner, or in bigger companies, their policies. Everyone is pretty happy with ARC in the latter. In the former, Bruce Thigpen of Eminent Technology is great to deal with, as is Roger Modjeski of Music Reference, the Weisfeld's of VPI, and of course Keith Herron. EAR-Yoshino's Tim de Paravicini I can't say, but his American distributor (Dan Meinwald) is an absolute a-hole.

Atma-sphere, Pass Labs and Modwright have always offered me absolutely exceptional customer service.  

Of course they would! Manufacturers would like nothing better than for us to buy their products, use them briefly and discard them in favor of their newest model. That's how the term "planned obsolescence" originated.

Lamm must be missing the boat since their model M1.2 Reference amps that I own have not been changed since they were first introduced  in 2004.  Longevity......greener than recycling.

I wrote to a cable manufacturer, asking him if I could pay him to shorten and reterminate a pair of expensive interconnects that I was thinking of buying on the secondhand market. His answer was, of course, 'no'.

Cardas has done this for me twice, as has Star Sound.

Steve McCormack has twice turned my old used McCormack gear into absolutely fantastic sounding, compete with anything, showpieces.

You should deal with a better class of manufacturer, there are many out there.

I have not had a lot of experience dealing with manufacturers of equipment I've bought used on Audiogon, but I have dealt with McIntosh and PS Audio and have nothing but good things to say about the experiences.

I purchased a McIntosh MAC6700 and though it was connected to an APC UPS, we had some sort of power "blip" while it was playing, corrupting the firmware.  I called the local dealer and they sent out a technician to re-load the firmware, and I was back up and running.  Of course this was a service I paid for (the unit was not under warranty).  Prior to that, I was considering purchasing an SACD player on Audiogon where the photo had the serial number blanked out with a slip of paper, contacted McIntosh to see if they had a list of stolen items, and they responded quickly.

As for PS Audio, I purchased one of their DirectStream DACs (new, from an authorized dealer), and they have provided multiple firmware updates on their website and have had questions from time to time and have had the pleasure of speaking with their technical folks, who were very helpful.