JBL, I hate you.

Thanks for being completely useless. I bought a JBL 200ID speaker dock at the Apple Store the day after Christmas since I'd been wanting a small speaker system like that for a while. I opted not to pay the incredibly high prices for a Bose and am seriously regretting not doing that or just not buying anything at all. I didn't really use the dock much for the first couple of months but when I decided to, I noticed that it would randomly pause songs that I was playing on my iPod Nano or iPhone. I tried a reset procedure that JBL listed on their support site, but that didn't fix the problem. After contacting their support team via email, I received a return authorization and paid about $23 to have UPS package and ship out the dock to them.

I received my replacement unit a couple of days ago and it doesn't work either, with different but similar issues. Instead of pausing songs randomly, this one skips to the next song at random times during any and every song I play. After writing back to support and asking them to send me a check to cover the cost of the original unit, my initial return shipping fees, and then shipping fees to send this replacement back I was offered a free upgrade to a more expensive unit to help offset the cost of sending back this broken replacement. Unfortunately, according to a review on Amazon, this higher end unit experiences similar strange issues that I'm having with my current one. Ugh.

My return period at Apple is up so I can't return it where I bought it and JBL has refused my request to send out a check refund. The representative said that since I didn't give JBL any money directly they can't give me any money back directly. Right. I called their support team today and a supervisor at JBL is looking into this for me now (apparently) and will get back to me in a couple of hours. I'm not really sure what he's looking into or what's going to come of this, but I hope it will be some sort of offer for a refund. If not, I'm going to have to accept the offer for the 400ID unit that I received via email.

I'm really not looking forward to either being out $150 for the unit plus ~$40 in combined shipping fees or having to fight JBL for some sort of refund. The best option may be for me to cut my losses and just sell this 400ID unit on eBay. This one retails for $249.99 so it will at least cover the cost of my original unit, the shipping fees, and a little extra. I can say for sure, though, that in the future I'm not going to go with a budget manufacturer like JBL when I need sound solutions. In this case, I would've been better off just not buying anything at all because of the hassle this has become.

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