Customer: Dell Denies Speaker Repair Under Warranty, Blames VLC

An anonymous reader writes "VLC is incapable of increasing the actual power past 100%, all that is being done is the waveform is being modified to be louder within the allowed constraints. But, that didn't stop Dell from denying warranty service for speaker damage if the popular VLC Media Player is installed on a Dell laptop. Also we got a report that service was denied because KMPlayer was installed on a laptop. The warranty remains valid on the other parts of the laptop. VLC player developer [Jean-Baptiste Kempf] denied the issue with VLC and further claimed that the player cannot be used to damage speakers. How can I convince Dell to replace my laptop speaker which is still in warranty? Or class action is only my option?"

Comments

Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[Pessime]

Find some way to ruin the whole unit in a way that doesn't void the warranty. Start a process that uses lots of power so your chips are working hard, and wrap it up in a hot blanket. Or something along those lines.

Re:Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[TheGratefulNet]

look, you're not fooling anyone. they stopped selling blanket warrantys years ago.

Re:Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[93 Escort Wagon]

What do you mean, "find a way"?

It's a Dell. It's going to fail during the warranty period without requiring any shenanigans from the poster.

Re:Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ex Dell grunt here. They fucked me and my town over, and are fucking over shareholders by going Private (the first thing they did when they no longer had to answer public questions was to outsource a bunch of jobs to themselves, the same thing they did to fuck my town over), so let me tell you how to fuck back.

Escalate to a manager. The managers almost always capitulate. Doubly so if you keep calling back and keep escalating. Typically they bump you to a "resolution manager" which is just a Tier 2 tech with a very specifically worded title (Resolution Manager - see, they're MANAGERS) to prevent you from having to escalate directly to someone in charge. Escalate again, and you'll get a real manager.

If you have a sales rep working with you, contact them directly. The sales reps will give you what you want to shut you up. If your employer or school has a Dell contract, THEIR sales rep can usually help - contact your IT staff or University's IT staff and see if they can help you. I replaced many a laptop part I shouldn't have because it was one of my contact's "boss's laptop" and they totally needed me to save them. And some universities are on a "just give the fuckers what they want" basis - the assclowns at Quinnipiac were the worst for this.

Email support may be a better route - email support is usually handled by more advanced techs, often by people in the US or Canada.

Don't threaten legal action directly, they have policies in place that basically say to end the call and blacklist you if you do.

If you manage to get the idiots in consumer (India) annoyed enough at you they'll punt you over to their Pro Support for business just to be rid of you, who will capitulate if they can. It depends on the mood of the managers, they're not SUPPOSED to be working on non Pro Support systems. Unless they're workstations, because the Workstation customers usually can't deal with India.

It's entirely possible the script has been updated to try and fuck you over if you ever use non-standard software on the PC, since Dell is bleeding money and can't afford to honor their warranties anymore. Keep fighting. You paid for that warranty and you're literally owed replacement speakers.

Re:Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[Svartalf]

And they're not fooling anyone either.

If there is software that can damage those speakers in the manner that Dell's trying to claim, it fails upon UCC 2-314 and UCC 2-315 out of box.

Per Mangusson-Moss, it's not legally possible for them to claim that their warranty is voided just because there is a piece of software put onto the machine because they didn't limit their warranty in this case in writing (and if they did put it in a fine-print manner, few would buy and they'd be in deep trouble with the Texas and other States Deceptive Trade Practices Act for doing so- because it's something that is deemed unconscionable (In fact, the TDTPA has the act in question as a laundry-list item for the law...it's illegal out of box...)) and therefore, they have to PROVE (not just CLAIM) that it was the software in question for Mangusson-Moss to NOT apply here, that they did something deliberate to damage the product. Because of the explanation from one of the VLC crowd on the forum pretty much shoots that out of the water (Not realistically possible to damage the speakers unless the speakers were substandard or defective...), the Warranty STANDS. At this point, Dell has one of three options allowed them by the Uniform Commercial Code: Fix, Replace, or Refund. Seriously.

Re:Force them to warrenty whole unit..

[countach74]

It should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware. Full stop...

I'm not so sure about that, especially considering the way speakers cool themselves. If you crank the volume up to the point where you're essentially sending constant, large square waves to the speaker, you're literally telling the speaker, "OK, move all of the way in and stay there for a while. Now, move very quickly all of the way out and stay there for a while." The voice coil of a speaker is cooled by the speaker moving in and out and *not* staying in one place; it is a fundamental assumption that all speakers (that I know of) rely on. If you pump a ton of power into the voice coil and force the speaker to stay relatively stationary, expect a failure: the shielding around the voice coil will deteriorate and you will end up with a short circuit. So while VLC cannot send more than 100% power, it can cause the speaker to operate in such a fashion that is unintended and dangerous to the life of the speaker.

Your solution may be that, "the voice coil should be designed to withstand this sort of [ab]use." But that is purely ideological and will likely lead to increased costs for manufacturers; it may also yield less powerful or inferior sound reproduction systems. I'm not sure what the consequences of such a mandate would be, but I'm almost certain neither of us would care for them.

To be clear though, I am not saying that Dell should void the warranty over this, only that the belief that "it should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware" is likely flawed.

Small Claims

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but your first path for court action is small claims, not a class action.

Re:Small Claims

[IQGQNAU]

You don't need a lawyer for small claims, so not being one isn't a big problem. Filing the claim will also get the attention of some higher ups that the tech support tree will block you from.

Well, I sued...

[Anonymous Coward]

So to keep,a long story short, I had to sue Dell over a overheating Alienware M11x GAMING notebook.

I had a friendly but non helpful support case with Dell and a short also friendly but also non helpful discussion afterwards. Then I sued.

I won.

Two options

[synaptik]

Option The First:
1. Buy Dell Laptop
2. Do first-use OS initialization, power down, remove HDD, store away in a safe place
3. Add new harddrive, install OS of choice
4. If at any time you have warranty service needs, swap original HDD back in

Option The Second:
1. Don't buy Dell
.

A "clipped" audio signal is still a valid signal

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the beauty of a digital signal: You simply can't put in a stronger signal than the bits allow. Yes, a "clipped" signal has high energy harmonics, but the same harmonics could be encoded right in the audio source signal without additional player amplification. For example, using mp3gain to set a high gain on any MP3 file will cause the decoder to happily produce a clipped time domain signal. Even Windows Media Player will play it clipped. Designing an audio system such that it can't handle any signal you could put in a WAV file is just idiotic. Such penny-pinching certainly isn't the user's fault and would not void legally mandated warranties. Dell can of course exclude anything they like from a voluntary warranty, if they make it clear upfront what is excluded.

VLC does not access the speakers directly

[MpVpRb]

..it uses Windows system calls which then call the sound driver

If the damage was caused by software, it's clearly the fault of the driver

VLC is too far up the stack to cause anything abnormal

Already in the law.

[Kaenneth]

Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.[7] This is commonly referred to as the "tie-in sales" provisions,[8] and is frequently mentioned in the context of third-party computer parts, such as memory and hard drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Re:bad engineering?

[inasity_rules]

No, it is compromise engineering. Which is OK for a lot of consumer electronics. For example, most laptops won't have enough cooling to dissipate full load heat at maximum rated temperature. This isn't a design flaw, it is a compromise to allow the designer to get more peak performance out of the laptop(or more peak volume in a movie, for example). It is the same with, say gmail. Do you really think google could have supplied every user 1Gb of mail space at launch?

I personally don't do this sort of engineering, but I can see the reasoning. And if you are trying to push high volumes out of your laptop speaker, you probably should be carrying external speakers. There are physical limitations to systems designed to be portable.

Re:Small Claims + Other Options

[esten]

Ask Dell what the cost of the repairs are then fill in small claims court for that amount.

Some other things you might do are:
1. Complain to BBB
2. Talk to your credit card company you have have additional warranty service under them.
3. Email CEO. michael@dell.com & link to Slashdot story

4. Nuke option. Have Slashdot email CEO michael@dell.com
(Would we crash their email server?)

Cinema speakers can be damaged too

[innocent_white_lamb]

You would think that cinema speakers (those big honkin' speakers that sit behind the screen at the movie theatre - mine are about about six feet tall but there are many larger than that) would be impervious to damage but some movies occasionally overdrive the speakers to a point that the drivers are damaged. The most recent one that I'm aware of is Paranormal Activity 2: The Marked Ones, where there was 7 seconds of high pitched buzzing on reel 4 that could destroy the speakers.

Here is an email from Paramount that describes the problem:

QUOTE:
Dear Projectionist,
Paramount has had reports of speaker damage from some theatres playing PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES. In several cases we have been able to research, the volume had been turned up to high levels at patronsâ(TM) requests.

We are currently working to get information on speaker/amplifier brand and model to see if any particular combination of hardware might be more susceptible to damage. At this time, most of the damaged speakers have been identified as JBL model 4632â(TM)s, but this is preliminary data.

We are also working on an audio patch which may lessen the potential for damage.

For the time being, please do not set your volume at a high level on this film.

Thank you for your cooperation.

END OF QUOTE
Technicolor sent out a new soundtrack for that movie without the 7 seconds of buzzing and as far as I know that solved the problem.

The point here is that even high-end cinema audio systems can be damaged by a poorly engineered soundtrack, so I'm not surprised to find that the speakers in a cheap laptop could be damaged the same way.

Definitely Small Claims and/or BBB.

[jrronimo]

I had a user whose laptop was replaced by Dell under warranty, except that they sent him back a 17" monstrosity rather than the 13" machine he had at the time. They wouldn't budget on giving him something smaller. After filing a small claims court case, they reimbursed him for the price of his original laptop and I think told him to keep the new one, too. He was happy after that.

Another friend had a HTC One phone whose screen popped and shattered while he was browsing twitter. HTC refused the replacement despite being a month old, claiming he dropped it. After filing a Better Business Bureau complaint, they replaced it under warranty.

Either way, something like that will get someone's eye and hopefully the original poster will be happy. The bigger problem is that this is a thing Dell will break a warranty over, which is ridiculous.

Email the company's lawyer

[pem]

Seriously.

The people who advocate small claims are half right. In many states, you have to send a demand letter before you can do that anyway.

Some idiots will say to email the CEO, but if you're lucky, that will just get down to the lawyer, and the lawyer will already be miffed because you've piled more work on him from above. Better to go straight to the lawyer.

I have had several successes, some quite large, and no failures, with the following strategy:

1) Try sincerely to resolve it through normal channels, as you apparently have.

2) Document how that didn't work. If you don't have good documentation, do (1) again.

3) Find the attorney or registered agent's email address. I have never had a problem doing this, but I'm pretty good at the google-fu. Good starting points for names are corporate bios, 10K filings at the SEC, and the Secretary of State's office (which might require a phone call). Since Dell is in Texas, they are required to have a registered agent with the Texas Secretary of state. I live in Texas, and I got Fry's registered agent's name from the Texas Secretary of State when I had an issue with them.

4) Send the attorney an email POLITELY explaining exactly what happened, and what needs to happen to make you a happy camper. Give them two deadlines. The first one should be about two weeks out to let the legal department research the problem on their end. The second one, at the end of the email, goes something like this:

"Please acknowledge receipt of this email within three days to save me the time and expense of sending a registered letter."

A registered letter is exactly what you need to do, in most cases, to put them on notice before you file in small claims. So this sentence puts them on notice that you are preparing to legally put them on notice, and since your speaker repair is way cheaper than dealing with you in court (you're not claiming the bad speaker damaged your hearing, or lost you business when the presentation went awry, are you?), they should be more than happy to do that.

One purpose of the letter that cannot be stressed enough is that you are not arguing with the lawyer. You are essentially presenting the same case that you would present in court. Your letter should be polite, without speling or grandmar erors, and compelling. Do not attempt lawyerese, because that is not required or even encouraged in small claims court. Just write it in plain English. You are not arguing with the lawyer, but you are showing him that you will present yourself well in court, and after expending time and money to defend, he will stand a good chance of losing.