Shocking product, shocking service

[P Zero]

I have just bought an Antec Micro Fusion 350 Remote case. Its a great case, but it is let down by one thing. The Imon VFD. When it arrived, the vfd had already fallen off the backlight and the ribbon cable come unplugged. The software is still terrible and the remote will not work whatever I do.

This is not my first bad experience with Soundgraph. 2 years ago I bought a Thermaltake DH-101 case, also supplied with an Imon VFD. I could not get it to work properly, the screen kept crashing, and the remote never worked. Ever.

I've come to expect almost non-existent service from Soundgraph. In the past I have had to rely on the user forums for any hope of getting anything to work, even slightly. But now we have a new forum, and the old forum is inaccessible?

Most of your customers have no choice about whether they buy your products or not as they are included in so many HTPC cases at the moment. So please, get your act together and give your customers the support they need. In my case, that means access to the old forum so I can search for solutions myself, as the Soundgraph support staff are rarely helpful.

[BennTech]

Wow, that's harsh, P Zero. Especially considering that SoundGraph employees actually do frequent these forums and offer advice, which is far more than most companies do. Furthermore, being offensive is not a way to get people to do what you want.

That said, I have to agree with most of your points.

Seriously SoundGraph, why wipe out the old forums? I imagine there was lots of useful information there and now that knowledge base is unavailable.

As for the actual iMON product, I have to say it is the worst part of my whole HTPC experience. Whoever the retarded SoundGraph engineer is who designed the always-on backlight should be slowly beaten with a spoon for the rest of his/her life (THSMWTEIW). What an asinine engineering blunder. I will never by any Korean lightswitches for fear that they were designed by this same asinine engineer to turn on all my lights as long as there is power to my house.

I didn't even really care about the display--I just really wanted to be able to power on my HTPC with my remote. However, the asinine always-on backlight is such an annoyance that I'm looking for a replacement to my otherwise fantastic Zalman HD160 Plus case. The only way to get it to go off is turn on the computer, boot Windows, start up iMON Manager, and tell it to turn the backlight off. That's the best your engineers could come up with?

In addition, the clock on the display has an impossible-to-read font, and displays the time in the bizarre format of AM/PM first. Even worse is that this is embedded in the firmware, which is not flashable and thus can NEVER be changed. Thus, I am forever stuck with a ridiculous time format in an unreadable font and a backlight that is always on.

Secondly, like so many other users, I'm having problems with the remote, although I'm having better luck than P Zero. At first glance, I thought the iMON Manager was exactly what I was looking for in remote controls--something that would let me easily customize the buttons of my remote per application. The reality is far less. Only after attempting to program the buttons I realize that I have pick what type of remote to emulate and each mode only allows certain buttons to be programmed. I can't seem to get the MCE mode to work at all, with the iMON Pad mode requires the repetitive tedious manual mapping of every button to every command for each individual application. Plus, the ".imo" files are some proprietary binary format instead of a nice, easy-to-manipulate text format like XML, so everyone HAS to use the slow, tedious iMON Manager interface. On the positive side, I must admit that the remote's mouse control is phenomenal--by far the best mouse-on-remote I've used. However, that's insignificant when I can't even control my system volume. Maybe things will improve for me once you've released your updates to work better with MediaPortal (my HTPC software), but that date keeps getting pushed back further and further.

I should have heeded all the warnings I read about iMON. The fact that there was not a single positive online review of iMON and that every post across the web was complaints and problems should have sent me running to the hills, but I figured, "How bad could it really be?" Well, turns out it's so bad I will never again buy an iMON product or a case containing an iMON product.

Thanks for ruining my HTPC experience (and the experience of thousands of more people like me).

[P Zero]

BennTech, maybe it is a little bit harsh, the staff do seem to be around on the forum.

However that does not change how I feel about the product. The case manufacturers really need to look at other options for LCD screens, or they are going to lose business.

[slash.kim]

Dear P Zero & BennTech,

Thanks for your deep advices.

My name is Slash Kim working for SoundGraph. I think you could say with such a harsh and offensive words because you feel you had very bad experiences of our product and of our support. I'd like to say sorry to make you be here with inconvenient feeling.

For a long time, we've tried to find the way to get closer communication with users without good result. With opening new user forum, differing from the old one, we decided that developers reply to the user's questions directly. We think it's the best way for developer to understand users' needs and for users to get more useful technical support.

I'd like to solve the problem with using iMON product you have one by one, if you don't mind it.

Dear P Zero,
If the backlight is already fallen from LCD and the ribbon cable (perhaps the cable between LCD and backlight) is unplugged, that kind of situation may occur during packaging or transport, because we could not supply that kind of disassembled LCD parts to ANTEC and ANTEC does not income them. You looks need to get RMA from ANTEC.

Best regards,
slash.kim