New Hifi Engine website

Folks, I am in process of making a website to replace HiFi Engine and looking to recruit help. My issue with that site started last week while visiting a local friend also in the Vintage repair business. He was at he moment fixing a fisher receiver, he attempted to download the manual from HiFi Engine it didn't work, not thinking about it I volunteer to use my login to see if would work (or if it was a temporary website issue, etc) and now we are both banned for life. My colleague (a 65 year old man well respected in the southern Ontario audio community with 45 years expience & 20 year speaker designer at Angstrom Speakers (when Higher Fidelity Company own it)) was using the site day prior with no issue, that was his first download that day. He & I were both long time users and never believe we violated any rules & respected the site's rules. Apparently they don't respect users and banned them for what ever reason they feel. So be it, don't care if the owner is that petty its his site to be petty about. I have registered HifiEgine.ca and have approx 100g of schematics to initially populate it with. I plan to offer the same upload/download ability but what I would like to change is obviously the "banning for life" aspect, have a method to contact me if there is a problem, I don't care if users have more then one account, larger download quota per day, and if someone wants a copy of everything on site they can cover my cost to ship a usb drive to them, not have the pfd's password protect so user can clean there copy up should they so decide, (again another of HiFiEngine.com's petty doings, guy it password protecting a item he is basically pirating himself (come on really!, Hypocrite at its finest)) etc etc. Basically remove the petty paranoid crap Hifiengine.com presently has. I am willing to maintain site myself as in terms of cost/equipment just need website programming help to get it going. Any body interested please contact me
 
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The guy behind hifiengine/vinylengine is a teeny bit paranoid and any attempts at multiple logons and you get blocked. He's also put download limits on. whic h is his perogative as his site. The part that galls me is that the manuals are crowdsourced and scanned by others but he watermarks them all. Ideal solution would be a source of manuals on here. Not sure how the copyright gets policed though...
 
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I fully second fixitguy09's experiences and observations on hifiengine.com. For whatever reasons, me too appear to have been banned. Ok, I've once forgotten my password and, after having unsuccessfully tried to recover it, created another account, using another e-mail address. It was fruitless :mad:.
@fixitguy09: Brilliant idea! Where do you think to get all the manuals from? Do you plan some crowdfunding for the required webspace?
Best regards!
 
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I feel I owe to Hi Fi Engine site for the hundreds of Service Manuals I have downloaded, studied and learned from. I have given back zero to them.
The site owner has to take his measures to keep it functional in the long run. I would put myself in his shoes first and then put out some strong criticism.
I too confirm Hi Fi Engine site functions normally.
It seems to me the OT poster doesn’t speak the whole story.

George
 
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Hi George,


Having been banned by VE in the past I can confirm there is one strike policy with NO comeback. If you accidentally lock yourself out there is no comeback to get yourself sorted. Giving a friend your login to get one manual rather than downloading and emailing it was an oversight, but should it cause a ban.


Note it's the treatment by the same site owner that caused Luckydog to be so twitchy on here. Years of his posts were just purged after a ban.
 
About Copyright - For many years I was a moderator on GTTalk, a garden tractor forum. We had a large collection of manuals for vintage tractors, collected from member donations over many years. All was fine for most manufacturers. Most of the manuals were for long out of production models. However, John Deere objected to the manuals and threatened legal action. We had to remove the JD section from the forum to prevent further legal action.
So a lot depends on how each individual manufacturer views the issue. There is also the Forum regulations to look at. If they forbid having copyrighted manuals here then it is a no starter to have them here, even though it is the best place for them to be.
Too bad about Hifiengine. They should consider offering a paid subscription service for forks who use the manuals to support a repair business.
 
I fully second fixitguy09's experiences and observations on hifiengine.com. For whatever reasons, me too appear to have been banned. Ok, I've once forgotten my password and, after having unsuccessfully tried to recover it, created another account, using another e-mail address. It was fruitless :mad:.
@fixitguy09: Brilliant idea! Where do you think to get all the manuals from? Do you plan some crowdfunding for the required webspace?
Best regards!

I will provide all the same download / upload options. I personally have about 100g (I think its about that I could easily be out to lunch on amount I will check one day soon) in pdf's, jpegs of schematics/manuals. I have shared those with Jan Dupont from Denmark and anybody else who has asked the past. The fellow to thom I associate with has literally 1000's of service manuals from his days of owning stereo store in 60's - 90's & his time at Angstrom Loudspeakers who was back then also distributed Onkyo here in Canada. We were the 2 that got "banned" so you can imagine he was not impressed when the incident happen and is fully on board to let me scan them. I have acquired the services of local web designer and she will be starting work on it shortly. I will keep all posted as this project progress'es
 
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About Copyright - For many years I was a moderator on GTTalk, a garden tractor forum. We had a large collection of manuals for vintage tractors, collected from member donations over many years. All was fine for most manufacturers. Most of the manuals were for long out of production models. However, John Deere objected to the manuals and threatened legal action. We had to remove the JD section from the forum to prevent further legal action.
So a lot depends on how each individual manufacturer views the issue. There is also the Forum regulations to look at. If they forbid having copyrighted manuals here then it is a no starter to have them here, even though it is the best place for them to be.
Too bad about Hifiengine. They should consider offering a paid subscription service for forks who use the manuals to support a repair business.

Nova Scotia, my favorite Canadian province, damn near bought a place on West Lake Anslie not to long ago, every time I go out to pick up child from university I spend time there looking for place.

Anyways I am off topic here, Yes a paid subscription would have suited me fine but some how HiFi Engine.com has not figured that out, hence why I just decide to use the money I otherwise would have paid them and start a more user friendly version myself. HiFiEngine.com is his "sandbox" to do with as he please's but he'll soon find out owning all the toys in the sandbox isn't much fun when all his friends leave cause he's a jerk
 
I agree with the intention to create more places like HifiEngine,
but am in doubt that the huge effort to maintain a task like this
can be done in spare time.

It is pretty sure that HifiEngine will be closed as soon as the
gentlemen over there loose interest in this business model.
Always better if you have the opportunity to choose.

This is what I wrote in another thread :
as_audio said:
In the meantime I will not recommend HIFIENGINE any more.

Being a valuable site I do not understand their policy.
They cancel hints to other websites with useful information or better scans for a particular unit.

I have been completely banned after trying to help somebody in their "requests forum",
hinting at a readable diagram in Elektrotanya.

This happened after I contributed tons of material: service manuals, diagrams
and repair tips over the years.

Now they call me "Anonymous" or "(not verified)".

"Thanks again to as-audio for the scans": it will not happen again.

There is no particular responsible webmaster, he is really anonymus.
The site is owned by some company.
 
I feel I owe to Hi Fi Engine site for the hundreds of Service Manuals I have downloaded, studied and learned from. I have given back zero to them.
The site owner has to take his measures to keep it functional in the long run. I would put myself in his shoes first and then put out some strong criticism.
I too confirm Hi Fi Engine site functions normally.
It seems to me the OT poster doesn’t speak the whole story.

George

Well George it is as described originally, but you will learn the way the rest of us did about HiFi Engine.com, and just to show no petty stuff on my site when its up and running, I won't "ban" for accusing me of not speaking the whole truth, everyone entitled to the opinion even if its wrong
 
hifiengine is a great resource for manuals. I've downloaded a dozen or so over the past few years. Replicating what they have done would take years I imagine.

I just downloaded onto my laptop a couple of NAD service manuals for some receivers I'm restoring. I would like to compress the pdf's so that I can load them onto my old windows 98 computer that I use on my workbench. Acrobat 6 won't open them so I tried to compress the files on my laptop but cannot do so because they are password protected.

Is there a way around this?
 
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hifiengine is a great resource for manuals. I've downloaded a dozen or so over the past few years. Replicating what they have done would take years I imagine.

In the early days i sent them a bunch of serive manual scans, mostly NAD (i had access to a nice service dept guy).

Have utilized the resource uncountable times.

dave
 
frugal-phile™
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I just downloaded onto my laptop a couple of NAD service manuals for some receivers I'm restoring. I would like to compress the pdf's so that I can load them onto my old windows 98 computer that I use on my workbench. Acrobat 6 won't open them so I tried to compress the files on my laptop but cannot do so because they are password protected.

Point to one of these?

dave