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HT12 / Max / Stable?
TrikinCurt
Posts: 158
in MAX by AMX
How many people actually work with the MAX system in a residential environment? Curious about honest opinions. Here is mine, it seems to be very flakey for a piece of equipment at the pricepoint.
It is in our showroom and I swear I am constantly having to pull out a power plug in the AVP to get it to work again. The on-screen interface is very bad. The touch-screen interface seems to just not do what you would expect sometimes.
The ripping is no better, all of the problems with AMG, lack of chapter info, various other issues.
As you can tell I am frustrated, but I really need to know if we made a bad decision getting the MAX or if I am just having some awful luck...
Curt
It is in our showroom and I swear I am constantly having to pull out a power plug in the AVP to get it to work again. The on-screen interface is very bad. The touch-screen interface seems to just not do what you would expect sometimes.
The ripping is no better, all of the problems with AMG, lack of chapter info, various other issues.
As you can tell I am frustrated, but I really need to know if we made a bad decision getting the MAX or if I am just having some awful luck...
Curt
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I think I have had all the problems you have mentioned, but I can also say I have worked them out for the most part. I do get the occasional AVM lockup, but I can generally trace this to a network issue; I must say, it is annoying to have to reboot them.
I haven't really experienced mush in the way of unexpected behavior from the touch panel interface, nor the on-screen, once everyone got used to how they work. They are consistent not only internally, but with how other manufacturers handle that kind of meta data. The most difficult hurdle was getting the end user to understand that a search result was independent of the "now playing" data, and looking something up and seeing it on screen didn't mean that was the selected title next time you hit the play button. But Escient is the same way. It's just something that needs to be gotten used to.
The AMG database is what it is. I have a client with a very eclectic collection ... lots of South Asian titles, and lots of demo discs. Funny thing, it finds most of the Asian things - what it has more trouble with is the QVC "Best of" type collections. Something that may hel with that is making sure you have the latest firmware. For a while, AMX had to update the look-up indices manually. The new firmware does it automatically, and I have found that an up-t-date index really helps in finding titles. Every time I have had it updates, I was able to locate titles that previously had manual entries.
I think the biggest issue is that it seems to be something of an unpolished product. It works, mostly. What isn't entirely intuitive can be worked around. But, as you say, for the price you expect more. You expect it to be highly polished and completely intuitive. I can't defend them in that - it sure seems like it still needs some work. On the other hand, it does get better with every update, and the updates are free. I've even had more than reasonable success getting AMX to reimburse my time spend on the job ironing out any issues.
Did you make a mistake in buying one? I don't think so. I feel like it's a good product that needs a bit more attention in deployment than we are used to having to give for an AMX product. Stick with it and it will get better.
It just seems it is hardly a focus product and the people I have spoke with doesn't make me feel like it will ever be (especially for residential).
I am curious, on the network side, do you use their switches? I have had pretty bad luck with other switches, even managed gigabit ones which has always left me a bit, well, confused...
Curt