I hope the eBay sellers are

testing the units they sell first.

I just received the 2 30 gig empegs I ordered from empeg UK (I'm in Canada and don't trust the US eStore) and one of them hung at the boot logo. I've gotten a response from empeg and I am about to try to fix the problem for the time being while awaiting a new cable from empeg.

I can imagine someone's disappointment after spending $500 US for an item they could have gotten at $200 only to have it arrive in a non-working condition.

Oh, and my second empeg is going to a friend in need!

Later!

Why should the sellers care? If there's a warranty claim it's up to the buyer to resolve it. They still have a year's warranty regardless of whether they're the original buyer or not. The only thing the seller has to worry about is making profit, which doesn't seem to be a problem.

Normally, you need the original receipt to act as a start date for the warranty. Oh dear what a quandary for the eBay seller. Does he sell the unit and not bother with the essential original receipt, or does he sell it with the paperwork? Probably the latter, as no doubt these people would enjoy rubbing some salt into the wound at no extra cost!

Actually Empeg doesn't ask for any kind of receipt.

Inside the riocar manual it says the warranty is not transferable from one user to another.

Even better. Forget the salt, get the vinegar, that will really smart.

I'm with you on this one (see my post in the other thread).

Just off hand, how are you going to attempt a repair? I contacted support with the same problem (what ever happened to testing these things before they shipped from the factory?!) and they are mailing me a cable.

Inside the riocar manual it says the warranty is not transferable from one user to another.

Hmm. Interesting. I wonder if that matches up with reality, though. I mean I guess they have a record of me being the owner of certain Empegs, but who knows if they're actually checking.

If they started enforcing this, it'd just be screwing the buyers anyway, not the sellers. It's the buyer's responsibility to ask if the warranty will still be valid and to ask SonicBlue/Empeg if they'll take it.

yn0t_

What's you opinion of a person stealing candy from a baby? Fair game?

Their suppost to be mailing me a cable as well, although its been a week and I hav'nt gotten it yet... i still have faith ; ) I got my empeg working by bending the wire but i want to put something in there that I know for sure wont just randomly stop working.

-Greg

What's involved in "bending the wire".

yn0t_ : I would assume (and probably WRONGLY) that a "new in-box" purchase on eBay would entitle me to the warranty....

What's you opinion of a person stealing candy from a baby? Fair game?

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I think the guys who are doing it are slimeballs but the buyer is the one paying the money. If a 10 gig Empeg sells for $800, that's what it was worth to someone. If they didn't do their research and they are denied warranty service, then it's on them, UNLESS the seller claimed they would be entitled to the warranty, at which point allegations of fraud would come into play. EBay has protection against that kind of stuff.

These guys are opportunists, they don't just do it with the Empeg, they do it with alot of other items (handhelds, etc.) They're shrewd and they have every right do do what they're doing. But in this case since we love the Empeg so much, some are taking it a little more personally.

So to return to your Monty Burns analogy, if the buyer is indeed a "baby" in terms of their knowledge of the product and the return policies, and they're the ones GIVING the candy instead of taking it, then I have no sympathy. If the buyer is misleading them with false claims, then the seller deserves legal recourse for being fraudulent.

These EBay sharks prey on the "babies" you are speaking of in your analogy -- those who don't understand the limitations of an EBay transaction and think that having a New In Box item is as good as buying it from the manufacturer.

yn0t_ : I would assume (and probably WRONGLY) that a "new in-box" purchase on eBay would entitle me to the warranty....

No idea. SkyHigH is the one who said the RioCar manual limits the warranty to only the original recipient. Based on that language, it sounds like an EBay buyer would be S.O.L. But as I said earlier, I've never been asked to provide a receipt when I needed warranty parts or repairs.

I got advice from an empeg person telling me how to fix it (without bending anything) and it works fine. A new cable is on the way however.

I won't post what I was told to do as it might have been told to me due to the fact that I have done work on these units before and he was probably aware of that.

René

It was a joke. Sorry.

You just 'seemed' to be defending these speculators. I don't think it's fair for that people should be taken advantage of. Not entirely related, but I've lost count the number of times a dutch auction get's rigged. E.g. a retailer puts up a job lot of TV's which have no reserve price with bid increments of £40, and then 10 minutes before the auction closes, someone bids for 25 units at £200 over and above the previous highest bid. Is that fair. These auctions sites have degenerated into an anonymous way of taking taking advantage of people whilst lining the pockets people of dubious character.

Hey man all I'm defending is capitalism. The market will determine the fair price. I agree a lot of shady things happen on FleaBay but the buyer needs to know that the person on the other end might be a schmuck and needs to bid accordingly. I happen to agree with the entirety of your last sentence.

I won't post what I was told to do as it might have been told to me due to the fact that I have done work on these units before and he was probably aware of that.

Was it anything that's already visible in the FAQ or the Drive Upgrade Guide? If so, there's nothing wrong with telling everyone what it was.

I'll send you the (simple) fix and you can decide if you want to post it here or not... you seem to have an inside link to empeg co. anyways.

Oh, did they use a StrongARM for your platform as well... this is definately the best AI implementation I have ever seen.

I usually advise people to use the end connector on the cable as it's the middle one that seems to have the poor crimp. Bending the cable or attacking it with a pair of pliers works too. These are temporary solutions though.

Spare parts like drive cables are sent by standard post - previous experience suggests that it can take up to two weeks for things to arrive in the US.

As far as the warranty goes, the drive cable is a faulty part that we know about - I'll always send out a replacement regardless of how the user got the player (unless I know it's stolen, of course) and regardless of warranty status.

2 of the three players I just bought for family members/friends stop at the boot up screen. I guess I should pop them open and check the cables first.

Thanks, I'll FAQ it.

Contact support so that I can officially give you the go-ahead to open the players.

I sent out the last of my drive cables today - more stock is due next week, so a temporary fix would be best in the meantime.

oops.................

well I opened them already, swapped in my empeg cable and both units work fine...phew

David, I emailed you at carsupport@riohome.com
No problem waiting for the cables. I'll just put these 2 units aside for now.

THANKS

Bob

a retailer puts up a job lot of TV's which have no reserve price with bid increments of £40, and then 10 minutes before the auction closes, someone bids for 25 units at £200 over and above the previous highest bid. Is that fair

It certainly is. You should have put your own bid in at "£200 over and above" if you had really, truly wanted one. Instead you got upset because your opportunity to go "bottom feeding" on the price got derailed by someone who was willing to pay what the items were actually worth. You had the opportunity to do exactly the same thing but declined.

As I have repeatedly said, an item for sale is worth what a willing buyer will pay for it. If the price is higher than you think is fair, then by all means refuse to buy it, and purchase a less expensive one instead.

tanstaafl.

"bottom feeding" is about the only way you can buy anything one ebay anymore no matter how ridiculous a amount you bid there is always someone there right at the last second to outbid you by a dollar

You can set the maximum amount you're willing to pay and e-bay bids you up automatically. How can somebody outbid you by a dollar if you have the maximum amount you're willing to be set? If you are THEN outbidded, then it's fine, because it would have been more than you were willing to pay.

Calvin

You can set the maximum amount you're willing to pay and e-bay bids you up automatically

Definitely the tactic that's worked for me.

Don't ya just love the tactics you see on eBay. Like when there are 6 identical items (simms), you bid on one, and it's the only one that gets bid up.

Well, being outbid at the last second (sometime literally) isn't the same as being "cheated" but it does deny you the opportunity to place another bid and it is done with the INTENT of denying you that. Again, the most I can say about it is that it is unethical.

I run a web site dedicated to an old Detroit brewery www.PfeifferBeer.com (by hosting provider just downgraded my account and now half of it doesn' work) and was bidding on eBAy for Pfeiffer Beer items quite a bit. The first time I even did eBay, I was "snaked" (the old skater in me) by someone with 1 minute left in the auction. So, on my next auction, I did the same thing to someone else. I was then given a polite email saying that I had every right to do what I did, but it is considered quite rude. And the PFeiffer collecting "community" on the web, I soon learned, frowned on that. I politely replied that I was new to eBay and was forgiven. This was important to me becuase eventually you'd learn who the other regualar bidders were and what items they liked or needed. So, people would suddenly NOT bid on items I was bidding on to help me out and I would do the same for them. GRanted, there were a few times that I had to say "Gary, we each want this 1910 vintage sign, so may the best man win!"

I really don't know what this has to do with the empeg/eBay fiasco, but I have to agree that it is spineless. Why didn't any of these people offer Sven (Smu) a RioCar when he kindy asked someone to buy him one and send to Europe for him? He asked this before they were even sold out.

Did Sven/Smu ever get one?

In reply to:

---

Well, being outbid at the last second (sometime literally) isn't the same as being "cheated" but it does deny you the opportunity to place another bid and it is done with the INTENT of denying you that. Again, the most I can say about it is that it is unethical

---

Not at all. You are given the opportunity right from the outset to put in the maximum price you are willing to pay. If you enter an amount less than your maximum and are not able to increase that amount at a later date, then that's your problem.
The trick is, of course, working out the maximum price you're willing to pay.

Nicholas.

Nick, I agree with you (slightly). That is why I said that the most I can say about it is that it is unethical. But, you can not honestly tell me that when someone bids from their broadband connection with only seconds remaining in the auction that they are doing so for any other reason but to make sure that no one can outbid them. I mean, come on. (sorry for the run-on sentence!) There is no other plausable reason that someone would bid at the last moment. They didn't just "happen upon" the auction at that very second.

Usuallywhat happens in any auction, online or not, is that you say "okay, I'm willing to pay $20 for that." Then someone bid $21.00. So you say to yourself "well, I knew I said $20 was my maximum bid, but I can't let myself lose this for 1 measly dollar!" So you bid $22. And also, you initial bid may be a bit lower because you are currently involved in several auctions. If you lose a few of the others, then suddenly you can rationalize spending more on the remaining auction.

Everytime I've been out bid like this at the last second, I do say "well, I should have bid more", but the fact remains that the person who did it had every intent to make sure no one else had a chance to outbid him/her.

Bidding at the last minute is called sniping on the ebay bidding message board. Go there and you'll find links to several pages that explain why people bid like that. It's mostly to protect them from people jacking up the price.
If you bid your absolute true maximum for the item and someone beats you out, they wanted it more. When you get beat by a small amount, look and see that it is probably one bid increment more than your bid. that's how ebay is designed to work. I snipe all the time, bidding my true maximum and several times I get the item for much less than my maximum bid. Other times I have beat other snipers because I bid my true maximum. I even lose because people wanted to pay more than I did.
True maximum is the most important term on eBay bidding, remember it and your emotions won't control your bidding, which is what you get into when you look for a bargain by "nibbling" at the high bid. Pretty soon you want it so bad your emotions take over.

If that is you true maximum, then why not bid it at the opening of the auction instead of waiting till the last moment? How would it protect you from anything other than another legitamate bidder getting a chance to big again? I'm confused. Are you saying that sellers jack up their price by trying to guess what the bidders max bid is? Wouldn't they be busy trying to jack up the price for the current high bigger anyway? How much safer are you by bidding at the last second?

I kind of getting what you mean - it is a way of protecting yourself from shady sellers.... but it is the other bidders that get screwed too.... oh well, i don't use eBay much anymore for these exact reasons.

Well there are shady sellers that will get poeple to "shill" for them or do it themselves. That is where they get a different ID and keep outbidding you, then after the auction they'll say the winner backed out, would you like to buy it for your high bid? It's against eBay rules. The high bid may not have been what you would pay if they were not shilling. And there are people that will just drive your bid up for the sake of it. That's legal, but just damned annoying.
Plus bidding late leaves you open to watch for other auctions of the same item and not commit to one item only to be outbid later. or lose the opportunity to get a good Buy It Now price because you have an open bid on auction. All bids are still, valid even if it's no longer high bid, ubtil the auction ends. So you don't want to commit to 2 $500 items when you only itend to buy one.

Dave, thank you. That makes much more sense. I'm sorry if I offended. I think that reason is very valid. I guess my experience with a little community of brewery paraphanalia collectors doesn't represent the eBay experience as a whole.... That"the high bidder backed out" thing is a slick one...

But, you can not honestly tell me that when someone bids from their broadband connection with only seconds remaining in the auction that they are doing so for any other reason but to make sure that no one can outbid them. ... (sorry for the run-on sentence!)

You need to have more confidence, dude! Other than misspelling ``cannot'' and the questionable grammatical structure of starting a sentence with a conjunction, both minor offences, IMHO, your sentence is perfectly grammatical, and not a run-on sentence at all. A run-on sentence is one that basically combines two or more separate sentences without a period, conjunction, or adequate punctuation, which yours is definitely not.

If only people would learn English (I don't have enough experience with bad grammar in other languages to speak authoritatively), they would be able to construct, and read, complex sentences without concern or confusion. Maybe if more schools taught Faulkner, complex sentence structure would be more common. It can be so boring to read the same ``Subject-Verb-Object'' sentences over and over. It's nice to see something else. So don't worry about making complex sentences. Just worry about your grammar.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your most generous compliment. I can make no promises to study Faulkner, but will studying "Faulk" suffice?

Its not just people with broadband connects. There have been sniper services/apps out there for quite a while that let you pick the maximum price you are willing to pay, and within the last few seconds of the auction, make a bid that is just above the highest. My guess is that Ebay implemented their proxy (or whatever they are calling it) service because of these snipers chewing up bandwidth to keep track of the times/bids - automation can refresh a lot quicker than a person can

No offense, just enlightening you on the reasons why people bid like that. It's actually really humorous on the whole. People get the idea that since they bid on something first, it's their's until someone "steals" it from them in the last minute. Alot of the snipers on the bidding board have come up with the joke that they need to snipe more items to fill the potholes in the driveway. People think many of the snipers don't really want the item they snipe, they just want to make sure no one else gets it.Trust me, I can blow money on lots of other crap instead of keeping items out of the hands of others on eBay. But I have gotten my Simpsons World of Springfield up to date through sniping...

eBay has always been using the proxy bid system. Folks claim it's unfair because it's not run like a live auction (most commonly known form), where you have a chance to keep bidding until all bidders are satisfied.
Sniping is just a bidding method developed uner the proxy bidding system... It's the best way to protect yourself from many things that may occur, like those I listed in a previous post.

OK back to our regularly scheduled thread...

Well, I still think that if it is done as a "bidding" meathod rather than as a means to protect oneself from crooked sellers that it is as bad as sellers jacking up prices. Just my opinion.

Is that a large mouth bass? Hard to tell from the pic.

Yes it's a large mouth, it was probably 10+ pounds at one point in it's life, but when I caught it it was 6 pounds. It's definitely in it's declining stage of it's life. The mouth and head were HUGE! I could almost fit both of my fists in it's mouth. It was my biggest bass of 2001. Looking for a 10+ this year... A few more bass photos are here

Oh and on my way to fishing, I always put the empeg on my "Fishin' Songs" playlist which includes:

Five Pound Bass - Robert Earl Keen
Beadreaux was a Nutcase - Austin Lounge Lizards
Fishin' Hole (Andy Griffith Show Theme) - Andy Griffith

Studying wfaulk? :-D

Calvin

I feel like I'm in the presence of a master e-Bayer. :-D

Calvin

What, no Fishheads by Barnes & Barnes?

Not an "eBay master" but I do well as a time conscious proxy bidder, aka a sniper. My badge of honor...

Aww crap! I knew there was at least one I needed. I'll have to find that one. What I really need to do is output the fishing TV shows audio to the computer then capture it and make mp3s. That way I'll maximize my learning time while on the way to fishing. I'll get to the pro ranks yet! Maybe SonicBlue will sponsor me with an empeg fitted Triton bass boat with a 250HP Mercury outboard...

I wasn't even in the auction, so I didn't get upset over missing a potential buy.

You've missed the point, I'm saying that the person who bid for 25 units was obviously the retailer trying to bulk up the price. It's this which I object to? If the retailer wanted to sell the TV's for minimum price, then they should have set a minimum price, that's their perogative. It's a bit unfair to change the rules mid-flow, and in real life auctions it is illegal for owners to bid against their own lots.

kojak71
"A fool and his money are soon parted"

I'm saying that the person who bid for 25 units was obviously the retailer trying to bulk up the price.

Really? That doesn't make sense. If the retailer did that, then he just bought his own TV sets. What would the point of that be?

tanstaafl.

Well he could then contact some of the bidders and say "the high bidder backed out, do you want it at that price?"

Simple, the retailer wasn't willing to allow the lot to sell at what he thought was too low (highest winning bids were in the £240 range) so he increased the bid to about £480. Some genuine bidders did go over that, and got themselves a very good TV, the others magically reappeared on another dutch auction a week later, and so on and so on, until the retailer has shifted all the units at a price the retailer likes which defeats the purpose of a 'no reserve price' auction.

why would you get one on ebay i just got one fromm sonic blue 30g for 399us

You're right, thrasher -- they're not sold out at all. All this whining and bitching is because we're all stupid... Thats it.

20GB -> brother @ cost
10GB -> friend @ cost
60GB -> self @ cost

I could eBay my current 20GB (Dec10, rebated) but I'm not that hard up to make a little bit of money.

I would bet that if you ordered one today from SonicBlue (30GB for $399) you would receive it within a week.

I ordered mine via the Web on Jan 7 (this past Monday), it got shipped from CA on Wed or Thur and it's sitting in the FedEx place here in VA waiting for me to pick it up tonight.

My buddy just ordered a 20 GB via the web because he can't afford $399 and he might even get that one.

But go ahead and pay $500 for a 10 GB without trying sonicblue first.

JP

That is so illegal.

Calvin

What's illegal? Selling items on Ebay?

Bidding on your own items, implied by the phrase ``he increased the bid to about £480.''