The Exogal saga continued....

@rtorchia sorry to hear about your troubles but thanks for informing all about this company. No matter how good their products are in coming years it will be one company to stay clear of.

I don’t know, kind of sounds like some form of being swindled. Being sold an unusable product.  But of course, my statement is based solely on the OPs side of the story.

"Swindled" may be too strong a strong word because when the apps were available (in my case for several years) everything was fine. I loved the Comet and bought the Ion for that reason, and tried to buy a Vortex. The basic point is that the Comet/Ion combo is application based as the CEO has himself stated on numerous occasions. On one video he actually tosses the cheap remote away and says it is junk! Without the application it is a pain to use--read their own advertising literature and how they are quoted in the reviews. This is not what we paid some thousands of dollars for and the units were sold on a false premise. They keep saying this new "Pulsar" remote is in the making and that has gone on for months. Then one has to play hide and seek to get answers from them and those answers are unsatisfactory.

This lack of applications is a very serious and fundamental issue. That is why I have made no complaints about the sub-par headphone jack on the rear of the Comet that even its creators consider inadequate. But that is typical of their poor business decisions, one that they remedied on the top Vortex model that was never produced. I very certainly could complain about all the fabulous potential for upgrades they advertised to keep the product from being obsolete; I think we have had reverse progress on that subject.

The veracity of my account is very easy to confirm: there are no more apps and evidently there is no new "Pulsar" remote (that they said they would charge $125 for if one didn't participate in the trial). Read for yourselves the CEO's two attestations that he made on this site a while back. Would you be satisfied with these evasive responses and litany of excuses if you spent all this money? After months? Nobody would like to hear the other side of the story (Exogal's) more than I, which is why I started this post. 

I refer you all to two Audiogon posts by exogal_ceo: one on February 20, 2019 in which we are asked to "be patient a little longer" and the other on November 10, 2020 in which we are informed "you are gonna have to be patient." Today is March 11, 2021 and I have tired of being patient. 

What would you fellows do is you bought a tube amplifier and the manufacturer said, "Gee, sorry, they don't make 12Au7s anymore--be patient while we design a new amp." 

We make mistakes.
We own up to them.
We make some bad decisions.
We try not to remake them.
We bend over backwards to make people happy.
We draw the line at bending over forwards, if you get my drift.

Your big gripe is that we abandoned our apps. I realize that you don't give a crap that we've spent more developing and maintaining our apps than we spent developing our DAC and PowerDAC technology. When two architecturally different platforms change 4+ times a year and a software engineer costs about $100 an hour to work on an app that we not only give away for free, but pay the app stores EXTRA so ads didn't run on them, you don't have to do a lot of math to realize that's a losing proposition for the company. I wish I'd been clairvoyant 8 years ago. Did I mention that we get analytics and that fewer than half of Comet owners even downloaded the apps? Live and learn.

When we conceived of and designed the products, we expected everyone would use the apps and the non-illuminated display was part of that decision process. the whole thing didn't work out. But if not being able to foresee the future counts as "poor planning" in your world, OK. This is life on the bleeding edge of technology. We make good DAC's. We've sucked at User Interfaces. 

As for your problem and "...having to chase down our sales manager on Audiogon." I can't think of a less productive way to search for somebody. I'm not that freaking hard to find. Me and the company are on every social media platform, our phone and email is on our website, which is the first thing that comes up if you Google "EXOGAL". But anyway, once you finally managed to track us down in our villainous desert hideout, the only acceptable solution you articulated is that you think we owe you your money back. Simply put: No. You bought them through a dealer - your issue there is with the dealer. You've had the Ion for about 2 years. We don't run a product rental company. Sorry.

We do have a bunch of loyal customers, many of whom have had issues that we resolved in a way that exceeded their expectations. You clearly think we suck. I'm sorry that I don't run the business to your satisfaction and I'm sorry that a bunch of s**t happened that affected our ability to do business effectively this year. We're a small company and we did the best we could over the last 15 months. 

I'm going to leave it with this: If you'd have come at us with even a slight attempt at civility, you'd probably have had a different experience with us. We've done a lot of out-of-warranty work and custom mods for people just because they said "Please". You came at me less politely than the tone in the bilge you wrote in the above posts. Do you often find success in crabbing at people? It must work for you. One of my personal failings is a distinct lack of desire to prioritize people who dump on me. Got that from my dad.

Do everyone a favor: sell your stuff. I hear people can do that on Audiogon. Tell whoever you sell it to that we'll help them in whatever way they need.

And before anyone feels the need to scold me on my tone: I don't normally talk to customers this way, publicly or privately. But since Bob decided to use both barrels on me personally, and the company I run in a public forum, well... just be glad there are zero words that start with "F" in here.

Jeff Haagenstad (...if you Google it, remember the two a's there!)
CEO, EXOGAL
651-964-0698 x700
jhaagenstad@exogal.com