I was satisfied for years with my Oster12 speed blender but it was about to wear out after regular use making smoothies, and that’s about all I could use it for. I never had a Vitamix but had many friends and relatives over the years tell me it’s the one, so I bit the bullet. I read many reviews and was looking for some thing that would make a good plant milk too, which means nuts get pulverized to smooth consistency. I have an almond cow, so I was curious how well a Vitamix would do. After reading many reviews, the 5200 was what seemed to have the best user satisfaction from repeat Vitamix owners, saying with the narrower jar that particle size was smoother. My first test was a smoothie using some frozen fruit, a carrot, roasted almonds (which I would be too hard to make plant milk out of), Chia seed, frozen fruit and spinach. I followed the instructions for order of loading and running time, and was quite impressed that the carrot, nuts and seeds were basically smooth as cream. Sure beat my almond cow! Cleaning isn’t as thorough with just whooshing water at high speed, so I do have to wipe the walls down inside the jug to remove plastered protein powder. Can’t take it apart to get it the blades bottom. Occasionally a few chia seeds still pop up in another batch of some thing so it’s not getting it off the bottom of the blades that well, but it’s food. The noise is remarkably loud and the power is like my worm-drive circular saw powered up on the kitchen counter (Tim Allen would be impressed). I felt like I needed a jet pilot’s license to operate it the first week I had it! I have had it about a month now and make a huge smoothie almost every day and follow the instructions on ramping up/down and using high speed to keep motor cooled. It still gets that hot electrical smell so finally tried making soup running it on high for less than 5.5minutes as instructed to see if that would “break it in” or just break it. -it still has that hot electrical smell but it’s not broken. Well, sounds like Vitamix warranty is solid and there’s years left on it so hopefully it’ll go away and not a sign that it’s burning up. It should come with hearing protection, but I’m impressed with the machine other than that.