You know, I just received my FC-12 today. And right off the bat I've got something happening that resembles the behavior described above. After the unit has been on for a few minutes, the top right switch just stops working. Restarting the Axe or even just pulling the plug for a few minutes makes it go away. But after some variable length of time it comes back.
I probably should have checked here first. But I figured I had a hardware issue initially so I emailed support. More to just ask if there was anything other than the standard stuff (cable, re-initializing the FC, resetting the system data, etc.) that I could try. And to their credit, they were really quick to respond. But it was just with an RMA. No confirmation that I had tried everything. No followup questions. No, hey there's a forum thread on this.. Just, "Send it back."
Which is OK to some degree I guess. But here's the thing. It comes with a disclaimer that if they don't find anything wrong they just send it back and charge me return shipping. And in addition, they have instructions to print out the email issue thread when you send it back. Like they can't tie this to an issue # and look at it online? And given that it takes a while for it to happen sometimes, you start to wonder if they will just turn it on, hit a couple of buttons and say, "Oh, well. Nothing to see here. Send it back and charge return shipping."
I didn't ask for a return. I asked for input and/or advice. None came. That bothers me a bit.
Now I'm wondering, "Do I send it back, or do I wait and see if there's a firmware upgrade that fixes it?" But I see passages like this:
So does the same thing happen to me? They swap out and something else goes wrong? And the fact that it's not always the same buttons that stop working bothers me quite a bit. And makes me wonder exactly how that relates to firmware? If it was firmware, I'd expect it to do the same thing every time given consistent hardware to run on. The fact that it's all over the place makes me wonder out loud how well they know their parts suppliers?
I kind of wonder what rolling back to older firmware might do? But I don't see any suggestions along this line. I'm not going to hammer them for things going wrong. I'm a developer for a fairly large software company. Things do go wrong. But how you respond when it's something like this does indicate something about a company.
I was kind of leaning towards a Mastermind given it's got a better display and isn't locked to the Axe, but decided that just works out of the box was the way to go given my past experience with the MFC. And the FC does cost less. But this has not been the kind of seamless, no integration issue experience I had hoped for. I'm going to be thinking hard on this over the weekend. Given all the issues with getting the FM3 out and now this I wonder if they're just past their capacity to deal with this kind of thing well.
I love that they keep improving on the product as long as humanly possible. I love all the extras they provide when they don't have to. But I'd take better support for something like this over a new flanger any day of the week.
