I figured this would be a pretty good place to post my experiences with the Spectrum monitor in the approaching-a-year that I’ve had it, with a focus on the recent troubles I’ve been having over the last month.
I received my monitor in November of 2021. When I first got the device, I thought it was a sleek monitor with a phenomenal panel, a good stand, fantastic IO, and terribly buggy firmware. HDR and FreeSync/GSync were effectively non-functional.
As time has gone by, the firmware has steadily improved in quality. As of Firmware Version 106, which appears to be the last that my monitor will ever be able to receive, the display itself is pretty fantastic and I’d have zero qualms recommending the display itself if not for all the issues. HDR, FreeSync, and GSync all work phenomenally, and the monitor has a number of pretty great built-in features like a realtime framerate display and crosshair that can be toggled without even popping into a menu. Good stuff!
Unfortunately, my experiences with support, and the longevity of the hardware, haven’t been great.
Back in June, the USB hub on my monitor seems to have randomly died. To this day, it remains entirely non-functional – multiple factory resets, full power cycles by unplugging everything from the monitor, trying every possible input and output combination and toggling every setting, the hardware appears to be just entirely dead. No data, no power, no video. Nothing.
For the sake of transparency, I did upgrade the monitor’s display firmware (to v106) and USB firmware (to 17.02) toward the beginning of June as Eve recommended that it would correct some issues with the new macs, but the monitor had been turned on and off many times, and used extremely frequently, in the duration between the firmware updates happening and the USB ports suddenly going entirely non-functional.
I contacted Dough (Eve at the time) on June 24th. They responded 10 days later on July 4th – which seemed fair, their support page warns of delays. They requested more information, and I provided it within 24 hours. They also asked me to flash the USB firmware, which I was unable to do, as the USB ports are entirely non-functional and do not show up within the updater.
They followed up 4 days later, on July 8th. Fair response time! Unfortunately, this response placed me with another representative, who asked for all of the same information I had already provided from a generic template that greeted me with “Hi Customer”. Much of the information requested was pretty irrelevant to the issue I was having (they wanted my GPU driver version, for example), but I provided it anyway, again, within 24 hours.
That was the last I heard from support. I waited two weeks before sending a follow-up to check if there was any movement happening, which now, two weeks later, has still not received a response.
I’m not really sure of what else to do, other than to post here. It’s been well over a month since a core part of my display that I had relied on pretty heavily stopped working, and nearly a month since support entirely stopped responding to me. Even if they were to suddenly get back to me tomorrow, we still haven’t gotten past the very initial phase of “describe your problem and your setup so we can debug further” owing to being handed off to another representative.
I’ve had to buy hardware in the interim to handle the same functionality the monitor’s hub used to provide for me, but it would be very nice to have a fully working product, or at least any kind of support, given that the thing was roughly a thousand dollars and is less than a year old. At the very least, it’d be great to be able to update to firmware v107 for PS5 VRR support.
it’s likely because I’m encouraging people not to buy their shoddy monitor and get something else instead.