Rekiwi's Blog

I'm disinclined to spend money on any electronic equipment with the brand "Sony" on it.

I bought my first CD player in 1989. It was a higher-end Sony model with all sorts of quaint bells and whistles, without which I never would have been able to endear myself to my dormmates by looping Snoop Dogg's "beeotch!" intro to Dr. Dre's "Let Me Ride" from The Chronic. At high volume. For a few hours. Really, I didn't mean to let it run that long. Something distracted me. Worse things have happened in university dorms.

But that Sony CD player sold me. It was cool. It was solid. It embodied the word "quality".

Naturally, years later, I bought a Sony TV, Sony camcorder, Sony receiver, and Sony DVD player.

The TV still pleases. It is a flat-screen CRT. We bought it from Amazon at a ridiculous discount at the beginning of the flat-panel revolution. It weighs 170 pounds. It will crush children in earthquakes. The TV and entertainment center are securely strapped to the wall.

The receiver is OK. It chafes at the confines of our entertainment center, requiring a fan to keep it from thermal shutdown, but it pumps sound to all the speakers and it's fairly easy to use.

The camcorder starting eating tapes after a year. The record button is starting to balk. I'm looking forward to something solid state and non-Sony.

The DVD player is a steaming pile of excrement. Its effect on my life reminds me of a choice excerpt from that Middle English bestseller, Piers Ploughman:

There was laughing and lowering and 'Let go the cup!'
They sat so till evensong singing now and then,
Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.
His guts 'gan to grumble like two greedy sows;
He pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while;
And blew with the bugle at his backbone's end,
That all hearing that horn held their nose after
And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.

I would love to ram a bough of gorse up Sony's collective fundament.

From day one, the damn thing just refused to play any disc that wasn't clean-room spotless and fresh off the press. If I'd had any experience with DVD, I would've returned the useless piece of crap.

Vast libraries of digital media taunted us with our blind, anecephalic Sony player. Nothing from the local library would play. Renting a disc from Lackluster Video was an act of supreme optimism. Netflix discs ran at about an 25% failure rate.

Faults showed themselves in interesting ways, sometimes with a refusal to play, sometimes with a maddening lock up that resisted anything short of turning off the player, sometimes with mystifying and instantaneous jumps to random index points on the disc.

At first I assumed that this persistent failure was inherent to DVD. My wife hadn't been enthusiastic about DVD to begin with and perfidious Sony only reinforced her suspicions.

Then my father-in-law won a free no-name DVD player in a store promotion. It was exactly the kind of player you'd expect would be given away: small, flimsy, and unrefined.

It played all DVDs flawlessly.

My guts burned like napalm.

I did some retrospective research. I found that our model of Sony DVD player was notorious in the digital media community as a dog, a lemon, a waste of plastic and electricity.

Then, just to dig the knife in a little deeper, I learned that our brand-name Sony DVD player turned up its nose at any format other than CD, DVD, or DVD-R.

This week, after years of pain, we swapped out the slippery Sony turd for a nice Pioneer unit.

I did my research before handing over my cash. Duh.

It plays all formats.

It plays library DVDs that look like they were used as Frisbees and chew toys with only the tiniest of digital artifacts.

It has a USB port on its front so you can play just about anything you can put on a USB device. I'm not sure how much I'll use this, but it was a freebie feature that didn't influence our decision.

So, like, wow. This DVD stuff is pretty cool. Finally.