Letter To The Editor

Letter to Sandy and Dave Waks who publish http://bbhcentral.com/index.html

Hello Sandy and Dave,

I enjoy receiving your newsletter. It is informative but with a personal touch.

Your “adventures” in getting an array of different products to work together is one of my biggest complaints with the current state of consumer electronics. Fact is, the lack of leadership in trying to simplify the whole mess is really quite sad.

It is a shame that the only solution these days to navigating the maze of settings amongst components is to revert to a Harmony remote. I too have one, and had hoped that it would quiet or at least lessen the bitching of my more technically-impaired family members. Unfortunately that dream never came true. Although I think the online programming feature is brilliant, the unit gets out of sync too easily and has several non-intuitive features that confuse someone who isn’t paying very close attention. Most notibly, it just isn’t very well set up to control my DVR.

My point here is not to discuss band-aid solutions like the Harmony, but to highlight the fact that none of these components can talk to each other yet. Why the heck can’t all the consumer electronics marketing geniuses get together in somebody’s suite during CES and agree on a protocol? There is absolutely no technical reason that all components can’t status each other through a data link and give control over to a “media controller” device.

Then your harmony device will actually work because the controller will “know” what status each component is in as opposed to an educated guess. Then when you pick “Play the last episode of Desperate Cowboys while recording Dancing with the Incontinent Gardener and play compilation #59 in the patio, your trusty media brain will poll each unit, turn on what needs to be turned on, choose all the settings, and voila’ everything works.

I know this would require an unprecedented amount of cooperation amongst all the makers of Audio and Video and computer devices. But with the apparent declining interest in “all-in-one” AV boxes, I see no other option. Someone has to wake up and see the growing frustration levels out there. Any day now I expect people to throw open their windows and start yelling “I’m fed up and I can’t take it anymore.”

Regards, John