Buyers beware if you plan to use the remote on/off feature.
Written: Aug 16 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Filtering works great. Looks good.
Can find on internet for lower than MSRP.
Cons: Bad design if you plan to use remote power off VIA your A/V Reciever.
The Bottom Line: It's great if you don't plan on using the remote power on/off feature via your A/V receiver or preamp.
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| audioyak's Full Review: Monster Cable Monster Home Theatre Reference Power... |
I hate this machine because I can’t use the remote power on/off feature via my switched outlet on my Harmon Kardon AVR 8000. Initially I wanted to use the remote power on/off feature for convenience and to save a little electricity, but I can’t because of it’s design flaw. In spite of the remote on/off design flaw everything else works as advertised.
On Page 7 of the manual entitled “Remote AC Control Hookups” it says to plug the AC Control Cord to “a switched AC power outlet on a receiver or preamplifier.” The manual also states ”This feature allows you to turn on/off your PowerCenter via you’re A/V receiver or preamplifier.” However, on page 11 of the manual it says to plug your preamp and A/V receiver to the switched outlet because “certain components don’t need to, or shouldn’t be turned on continuously” and because “this filter is “Optimized to provide maximum noise rejection for sensitive analog audio components.” Do you see the problem? The A/V receiver can’t remote control the 3500 because there’s no power. Why is there no power? Because it just turned it’s switched outlet off on itself. What does the mean to you? It means you paid extra for the remote control circuits that can’t be used, unless you bypass the analog filtering and plug you’re A/V receiver into an unswitched outlet, which in turn totally defeats the purpose of that fancy 3 stage filtering. The engineers at Monster screwed up big on this portion of the system design. The only way this would work is if they redesigned it so that when the “Normal/Remote” switch were set to “Remote” it would make the A/V Receiver outlet unswitched. You can even see the design flaw on the fancy schematic they printed on the top of the machine to impress you. This is a huge design flaw in my opinion. How could they continue this design? Well, I guess most people never use this feature and therefore they hear no complaints.
Shame on Richard Marsh, Demian Martin and Noel Lee for designing this product and then putting there resume in the manual and then having there names boldly printed on the top of the product to wow you into believing you have a quality product. How can they claim to be great engineers when they can’t get a simple piece of hardware logic right? Makes me feel they took short cuts in other areas of the design as well.
In short, this is a very nice product up until you try to use the remote power off feature, at which point it totally sucks, and at this point you should feel totally ripped off for paying the extra cost of the remote power on/off circuits that don’t work as advertised.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
audioyak
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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