Die-Hard Proceed Owners...

The complement to the No.40 I heard was going to be
around $15/20K.

Think about it, the MC-8 is at the same price mark as
the AVP2, the MC-12B is $10k, and not a lot of people
can afford $30k (atleast not since the .com bubble
bursted). Also, I believe this new unit is more than
a year off. Don't forget, they are working on a
Levinson DVD player too.

Moving forward, we/us Proceed die-hards need to unite
and pressure Harman to live up to thier promises
starting with the promised software upgrade which gives
the AVP2: Ultra2, DTS:NEO6, DTS96/24, etc...(as promised
on the Proceed webpage). This is already available as
version 2.00 for the No.40, and they claimed the two
units shared the same software. So as I see it, they
owned Madrigal when the promise was made, they own the
promise.

From what I have heard, the AVP2 is worth $4000 towards
a MC-12. As I see it, I couldn't justify $6000 to move to
a MC-12. Plus you would take a hit on 2 channel listening

The easy part is sending the letter, the tougher part
is to get enough people to commit and send the letters.
I believe that they need to get buried with mail to have
a real effect. So we need to identify our goal, which
I believe should be to have the AVP2 get software updates
when the No40 gets them. I don't think we have any chance
of getting any thing for the PMDT though.

If all agree this is the objective, we now need to rally
the troups. It would be awesome if we could get Levinson
owners to request it too.

So how do we rally the troups?

As I see it, we need to gather the following and go from there.

1- Identify key contacts (and addresses) at Harman International and Harman specialty group. I have started a list here, but need to verify addresses and see if there are others we want to mail.

Wayne Morris
President
Harman Specialty Group,
3 Oak Park Dr.,
Bedford, MA 01730-1441.

Dr. Sidney Harman
Executive Chairman Harman International

Bernard Girod
Vice Chairman and CEO Harman International

Gregory Stapleton
President and COO Harman International

Frank Meredith
Executive VP and CFO Harman International

(Is this the corporate headquarters???)
Harman International Industries, Inc.
250 Crossways Park Drive
Woodbury, NY 11797

Erich Geiger
CTO and Chairman Harman/Becker
??(Becker Division) GmbH
??Postfach 74 22 60
??D-76303 Karlsbad, Germany

2- Put together a collection of press releases, Sales Bulletins and correspondence from Madrigal and Harman with all their promises and assurances which we can reference in our letters. We need to have names, dates and sources so we can sustantiate our claims. Some examples:

http://www.madrigal.com/proceed2002/avp.htm
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1049600224&read&keyw&zzproceed
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/newsflash/madrigal-mark-levinson-4-2003.html

3- Identify a realistic list of requests (not pie in sky, but obtainable). Possible ideas...

-Provide software updates for the AVP2 for 2 or 3 years.
I doubt they have the resources to develop new hardware
for the AVP2, but they did claim the No.40's software
was easily ported to the AVP2. 2 or 3 years of updates
seems resonable to me.

-Provide an affordable upgrade/trade-in to the next
Media console (the No40 complimenting unit Wayne Morris
alluded to in his "important notice" on their website)
(AVP2 owners). They did tell us we would be able to
upgrade our AVP2s to Levinson's, didn't they?

-Provide an affordable upgrade/trade-in to the upcoming
Levinson DVD player (for PMDT owners). A lot of us have
already invested $6k to $7.5k (PVP option) to help them
debug and learn about DVDs.(they probably should just
trade us even(wishful thinking, probably pie in the sky?)).

-Other ideas here

4- Draft a template letter which we can all use as a starting point in drafting our letters to Harman. This template should include:

-expressing our displeasure about being dropped by them

-any and all horror stories of what we have endured as
loyal customers while they worked on fixing all their
bugs. And should include how much money you have
invested and how much down time you have suffered.

-mention how the resale value of our equipment has plummeted.

-List our requests and reference all the promises,
claims and assurences they have made.

-mention how this will not only make things right with
their Proceed customers, but will be a great PR move
in attracting new customers.

-Other ideas here...

5- Identify and solicit Levinson owners to write letters to Harman supporting us. I don't think they can afford to alienate them too.

6- I wonder what the dealers can do to asist us as well?

Let me know what you think. Once we refine this we can do a new post to get the letters rolling.

Cheers,

Gerry,

You can still access the proceed website in its limited
state (i.e. just manuals).

Go to http://www.harmanspecialtygroup.com/

and click on Proceed Audio under the quick links menu.

HTH,