In the TC1000's "defense", I must say that I had IR range trouble with my Technics CD player, but by chance I relearned some of the codes, and since then the TC works in all situations for all my devices, even bouncing the signals off the walls.
Anyone out there having to direct the TC "hard" towards a device would be well advised to re-learn some buttons and see if this makes a difference. It may be something to do with using in-built codes as opposed to learned ones ? (although I fail to see why this would be so, it seems to work for me...)