Will,

Thanks so much for the reply. I do know, of course, that technology is obsoleted, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, but I respectfully claim that this has nothing to do with what I see as the shortcomings of the Sony RM-AX4000.

Modulated infrared codes are nothing new and it is my contention that all universal remotes ought to be able to deal with all of them. I have had several universal remotes and none of them have had nearly as much trouble reading the signals of other remotes as the RM-AX4000.

For example, I have a huge, heavy universal remote, designed and built in 1985, which came with my Philips CDV-488 LaserVision player. I never found a remote which it cannot read effortlessly. It reads all remotes with equal ease, from the earliest I can find to the latest, the one which came with my digital cable box. In other words, it's backward compatible and forward compatible. And it was designed two decades ago. Sony simply has no excuse for the RM-AX4000's inability to support older devices nor its extreme difficulty to read almost any infrared signal I've tried to train it with, old or new.

While I was on hold for a half hour yesterday waiting for Sony technical support (which was, in fact, useless for the tech was not trained on the device and the only information he had at his disposal was the Adobe Acrobat version of the instruction manual, published in a difficult-to-read in Acrobat booklet format), it finally dawned on me that I could get past the Wizard roadblock and on to the main programming application by finding any remote that the RM-AX4000 could read. I tried them all and, finally, got it to read the remote of my newish Scientific Atlanta cable box. Even this was an ordeal. I discovered that each remote has an optimal separation distance. Too close and the RM-AX4000 overloads. Too far and the signal can't be read. Also, I discovered that one must play with the poorly documented signal length setting, available only in the advanced tab portion of the main application, and that the timing between when one tells the application to read the remote and actually pushing the button on the sending remote is critical. This time lag also varies, apparently, from remote to remote.

So, I got the Wizard, finally, to recognize the cable box remote and told it that I was done programming. I discovered, with great relief, that the next time I started the programming application, I was sent to the main application and was able to skip the wizard. I was then able to find a stored code for my old, 1985 Mitsubishi TV but was disappointed to discover that most of the TV's functions weren't programmed. It took me over an hour to program brightness, color saturation, hue and a few other functions.

Then, I attempted to add my TiVo. I found the stored codes for DVRs and, lo and behold, TiVo, the market leader, isn't included. So, I picked one at random and programmed my TiVo button by button, which once more took over an hour, this due again to the RM-AX4000's reluctance to read any infrared signal.

Then, I attempted to add my Sony DVD/VHS combo. I'd read a note on Sony's web site that the RM-AX4000 doesn't have support for such combos due to technical limitations. Swell. I discovered, of course, that none of the stored codes for Sony DVD players worked on mine. So, again, I picked one, to get the button layout, and programmed the whole thing. Lo and behold, though this took about an hour and a half, due to the fact that the RM-AX4000 had more trouble reading the Sony remote which came with the combo deck (just a few months old) than any other, I achieved full functionality and found that there is no reason, technical or otherwise, that Sony couldn't have included codes for this device or, for that matter, other combo units.

In the end, after hours and hours of fussing, I got the RM-AX4000 programmed. I find that its output signal is quite strong and that it is relatively easy to use, but I would still give this device my lowest rating, this due to horrendous design of both hardware (its inability to read IR signals) and software (non-obvious key combinations which must be memorized for things like setting the clock and, of course, the dreadful PC programming application).

One last thing... When you excused Sony for not attempting to support older devices, you mentioned the computer industry. Indeed, you are quite correct that the toy, I mean PC industry, makes little provision for backward or forward compatibility. This makes perfect sense as most innovation is done without planning and most standards start out de facto. But this is not the case with IBM mainframe computers. Until the recent utter collapse of the economy, I used to be an IBM mainframe Systems Programmer. I started using IBM mainframes of their current series in 1966, two years after their introduction and nine years after the monumental project to design their System 360 line began in 1957. This was the largest hardware/software project ever undertaken and the result was a design of almost unmatched elegance. Today, over four decades later, IBM is still making mainframes and software for them (though they appear to have forgotten how to market such products) and, to their great credit, despite continuous improvement of the platform, they have, for the most part, maintained compatibility. Any program I wrote back in 1966 will still run perfectly on a mainframe made today with today's operating system, which is also compatible. I'm not saying that Sony devices must be as backward compatible as multi-million dollar mainframe computers, but I am saying that they could have tried a little harder.

My faith in Sony has been severely shaken by this miserable but not inexpensive product.

Jeff Broido