In my experience over 4 decades Ive found that its not just about the customer support (though that is the primary consideration)...it is also immeasurably about long term serviceability of great products 15 -30 years down the road. With that in mind, I nominate the following companies for the reasons listed:
* BRYSTON: 20 yr transferable warranty, no questions asked...they track the initial sale of every serial number...so it doesn't matter if you are the 3rd owner without any paperwork....add to that quality servicing after the 20yrs.
SILNOTE: There is no customer service rep...you are on the phone/facebook/email with the Owner, his wife, or the lead Technician. They are each and everyone personable and genuinely wanting to help you for the sole purpose of audio nervana amd the live of music.
* BOB CARVER: not only can you speak to him directly on the phone or email about ANY of his past and current products with service and even advice on how to improve on them, but his primary engineers will also pick up the phone or respond to emails...not just some customer service rep. The techs from his past products have set up shop servicing, upgrading, or straight repairs for amazingly affordable prices relative to what typical manufacturers charge just to service old products. Additionally, his product fan base makes for tremendous amounts of easily accessible advice online for every product he has ever built, to include upgrading.
*MARTIN LOGAN/PARADIGM/ANTHEM : Simply put, talk about a large company that Truly Cares! Very hard to find in today's world
Between all of our posts here are sooo many companies being listed, it almost seems as if NONE are poor. Might be interesting to hear warnings to one another of bad experiences with customer support. With that, here follows:
OPPO: I whole heartedly disagree with a prior posters assertion they are great. In my view they WERE great. Just 1 yr after issuing a product with major sales (udp 203 and 205), they have cut off live phone support for those and prior disc player products....email ONLY folks! Good luck with how many weeks of back and forth emails you'd have to do to get to the bottom of a problem or an authorizarion to send a product back for warranty repair, ESPECIALLY if you are not tech savie...how much fun would that be explaining a problem by email?
ESS (British Speaker Company & owner of the original Heil Air Motion Transformer design/expired patent): This company has now been reinvented 4 times since it's birth in the 70s when John Heil patented the AMT, now mimicked by Golden Ear, Emotiva, Legacy, etc (rebadged as the folded ribbon tweeter). They constantly offer lifetime warranty on their speakers, then go under, only to be refinanced or bought by someone else, without honoring of the prior products/company of same name's, lifetime warranty. Interestingly, and even worse, the current ESS says they'll repair the original issue of speakers from the 70s (not 80s or 90s, etc), for straight PR, yet they do that full well knowing it was a US only company at that time, of speakers that weighed 110lbs (AMT 1A Thru AMT 1D) and were huge....good luck with the shipping charges to send those to Britain and back for 'Free' repair!
SONY: Talk about a company that goes out of its way to avoid honoring warranties! Consumer complaints everywhere on the net from Televisions, to disc players and beyond. Throw in, that while they may be hi quality visual/sound/etc for the money, and feature packed, they too often seem to have annoying shorcuts or omissions in features that you don't realize until you own it. I've been seeing this since the 90s over and over again.
