Garbage in from the sharpener, garbage out to the customer. That sucks, and I am sorry to hear that!
So- my question is how do they treat skates in regular machines?
I do know of a place where they have both machines and the experienced hand sharpeners have so much disdain for the Sparx machines that they would do the same sort of deal.
I will be investing in an edge checker just for the fact that it could be greatly useful for when I do skates I have not touched previously. The one time I did not do the marker test on skates that were horrendously rounded over (and the user used some self-sharpening devise) that I did not get a wonderful edge on there. Never again- I will always do marker on the blade and run ten passes MINIMUM on skates like that.