USL CMS-2200 marriage problem

[Sean McKinnon]

Did you call QSC or Q-Sys? Im not sure if they have different customer service phone numbers but I would make sure youre calling Q-Sys not QSC as that is now the consumer facing brand (thing powered speakers at guitar center) Q-Sys is the professional arm including cinema speakers.

[Steve Guttag]

I would probably seek out Tom Atkinson. I don't know if QSC is having Seth field any calls at this point. He is much more behind the scenes on plugin development/coding. I may be wrong but I think Seth is all that is left of the USL crew at QSC.

[Jose Angel Velasco]

Did you call QSC or Q-Sys? Im not sure if they have different customer service phone numbers but I would make sure youre calling Q-Sys not QSC as that is now the consumer facing brand (thing powered speakers at guitar center) Q-Sys is the professional arm including cinema speakers.

I opened a ticket at Q-Sys, and they told me to contact to the local distributor. I contacted to the local distributor, and they answered that they should consult it with Q-Sys, and I don't have more news since a week.

[Leo Enticknap]

If the local distributor is an official QSC/Q-Sys dealership, they are not doing their job (acting as the post-sales support point of contact for end users in their territory), which is something that QSC/Q-Sys should be concerned about. All I can suggest is to contact QSC/Q-Sys again, and let them know that this company has refused to help you.

We would never turn someone away who came to us with a fault with equipment from a manufacturer that we represent, especially in the context of a manufacturer/dealer relationship that explicitly states that we act as the initial contact point for end users; even if the equipment in question wasn't purchased from us, or was but a very long time ago. It sometimes happens that we try to help but can't get the fault fixed (or only can by by selling replacement equipment), usually because it requires a non-generic part that can no longer be obtained. But we would certainly make the approach to the OEM first if that was appropriate and could possibly be useful.

[Jose Angel Velasco]

Hello.
Finally QSC answered me saying that they no longer provide support for this discontinued reference. They know the technical reasons why each of the equipment was not working, as they had seen in the logs, but they cannot do anything since they say they do not have the tools or the knowledge to get it out of that state. They have not given me more details of the technical reasons. They have simply told me that they cannot solve it.

[Harold Hallikainen]

It's too bad when a product loses support. The CMS-2200 was developed by adding a server board to the USL IMB (also sold by Dolby). A limited number of these were sold as there were various issues. USL then started development of the CMS-5000, moving away from the Power PC processor to a four core ARM. Early in the development of the CMS-5000, there was a CPU change as I recall from a two core to four core ARM (I remember the CPU change, but not for sure what we started with). USL built a secure keying room and secure test area for the CMS products. Then, around 2016, QSC bought USL. QSC continued CMS-5000 development with the former USL staff in the former USL facility in San Luis Obispo. https://www.dcimovies.com/compliant-equipment lists the CMS-2200 as passing DCI tests in 2013 through 2016. It lists the QSC CMS-5000 as passing the DCI tests in 2019. Then COVID hit, and QSC dropped many (most?) Cinema specific products (and I retired from there in June 2020). I suspect QSC relied on the secure areas of the USL building for CMS rekeying and other services, and they are no longer in that building. It looks like the building is now occupied by a construction company. There are nice photos of the building at https://www.showcase.com/181-bonetti...3401/21782712/ .

So... product support on everything ends. It's too bad when it happens to a product we spent a lot of money on.

[Steve Guttag]

I suspect that there was a bad cinema feeling overall at QSC. Look at how they decimated that division. Plus, I think QSC spent a large sum of money on the CMS-5000 to be a key component to bring Q-SYS and cinema together. Though, really, you are using QLAN-A and/or QLAN-B instead of AES3 and the DCIO/DCIO-H So, if the cinema bought into the CMS-5000, the front-end of a Q-SYS system would be included.

I think a problem that USL, and then QSC, faced is that the pool of servers was already divided up pretty well before they tried to get their foot in the door. You have your Doremi people your GDC people...then a big drop off to your Dolby people and, in some parts of the planet, Qube. Then you have Barco and Christie blowing our their dedicated servers for cheap...which ties your hands more to those projector brands. Where was USL/QSC going to fit in? I bet someone looked at the money spent and realized there never was going to be a payback on it with the potential sales. It could only be viewed as a loss-leader to get Q-SYS, their star product in the door. However, as EVERY server company has discovered...making a reliable cinema server has a lot of growing pains (Christie's IMB-S2 being at a 100% failure rate...to the point of supplying, your choice Dolby IMS or GDC SX3000, at the time, for people bit by the IMB-S2. USL/QSC would still have to go through their growing pains as well as being nimble enough to adapt to the industry as it evolves. I have no doubt that USL would have done it, on their own (though they still would have struggled for market share) but QSC is a very numbers-driven company. Cinema is too moody, particularly for the current leadership.

In any event, I think Seth is all that is left from the USL team and he is working with their Q-SYS stuff and plugins, the last I heard.

[Marco Giustini]

it's also sad that because there is no intention to support a product, the product becomes a piece of polluting garbage - simply because there isn't a room with a machine to "fix it".

I understand the business idea behind this but we have limited resources on this planet and I think this type of strategy should not be allowed.

[Jose Angel Velasco]

Since it's not fixable, I guess no one has the root password to experiment a little, right?

[Steve Guttag]

The same was true for Dolby and the CAT745...one of the outgrowths of C19 restrictions and the change in worth philosophy (remote work), the location where they had their apparatus that met the FIPS requirements to work on the CAT745 was not renewed and Dolby wasn't going to go through the expense of setting up another facility for a now, discontinued product (by over 5-years, at that time). C19 and how people reacted to it has will have far reaching results. That and AKM (key IC manufacturer) burning to the ground really it any audio company hard (any one that used Analog to Digital converters).

As an industry, as some of us predicted, moved from equipment designed to last/be supported, for the life of the theatre to one with, relatively, short life-cycles. The nature of some of the technology does not lend itself to field repair, like it once did. Projectors are the most field repairable thing we have and that is just to degrees and mostly module swapping.

I question if we can afford these relatively short life-cycles that don't really benefit the industry.

[Harold Hallikainen]

We used a LOT of AKM chips. As you mentioned, ADC and DAC, but also DIR/SRC chips. Those were on every AES3 input pair to convert the incoming AES3 to 96 ksps for the DSP.

I spent a fair amount of time designing around parts that had gone obsolete. In early 2020, I had to revise firmware for several products so the firmware could determine which serial flash memory chip was being used, then enable the code appropriate for that chip. Earlier, I had to add code to the JSD-100 to determine which display was being used and enable the appropriate code since the original display was no longer available. Displays seem to be a real issue since their target market is cell phones with a very short product life. Luckily, most of the parts I've designed into products, at least from 1995 forward, are still available, or there are workarounds (excepting AKM).

Ideally, this solid state stuff should pretty much last forever. But when it fails, finding parts will be quite difficult. And so much of the product is now firmware that may no longer be available. I still have code for a product I designed in 1980 (using MC6800 assembly language). But I don't have an EPROM programmer anymore. There was one at the local surplus store, but I did not buy it quickly enough.

[Steve Guttag]

Yeah, depending on the display, longevity can be quite challenging. A simple LCD display (like the CP650) is going to have many more options than one expected to do graphics, fit a particular opening...that sort of thing. QSC's OLED displays for Q-SYS products have become unavailable such that none of their new products will have them. Part of the Core 110 v2 changes was the removal of that display. Oddly, the GPIO also had to be omitted in the V2 as well. Both changes were an outgrowth of the event around 2020/2021. We are bound to feel similar problems throughout the cinema technology area as equipment ages and parts disappear without a financial incentive to redesign things due to parts becoming unavailable.

There was a time when repairs were considered more profitable than selling new. If you were to add up the parts to make a product, it would cost many times more than buying a new version of that product. However, one never bought EVERY piece of a product...just a part or two at a time. Thus, once you engineered a product, say a film projector, you no longer have to expend that engineering time/money and can do well just selling parts to support it (on top of new sales of a product that you've owned for a long time). Now, they'd rather sell new...particularly when repairs, for the most part, are changing PCB that may comprise 75-90% of the product itself. I also have noted that manufacturers are also not set up to do board-level repairs anymore (it depends on the product/industry). In fact, some are now going out of their way to thwart such repairs by serializing parts for no good reason beyond preventing the repair (a serialized product means that component parts have the equivalent of a KDM in order to work in that specific unit).

[Harold Hallikainen]

Manufacturing costs have really decreased with the use of printed circuit boards and automated assembly and soldering. When I started in electronics, I assembled hand wired vacuum tube equipment. Surface mount has made automated assembly much simpler. Machines no longer need to bend leads and try to hit holes in a PCB. Instead, solder paste is stenciled onto the board, parts are placed robotically, and the board run through an oven to solder. Assembly costs have gone way down. But repair costs have not since there are hand operations. Software in the product can help identify where a problem is (all the products I designed have Power On Self Test that spit characters out the RS232 port indicating where the code is in initialization and where it fails). But, to repair, you still have to open up the product, unsolder the most likely failed part (which may not be the correct one), solder in a new one, test, reassemble, and ship. A simple repair can cost more than the original manufacture of the product.

This is unfortunate in that there is an economic incentive to throw stuff away and buy new stuff. I try to fix things. I get a monthly report from Google on which of my web pages are the most popular. Consistently, the top page is this one ( https://hallikainen.org/hzb-12b/ ) about the repair of an ice maker.