Audio Research Reference 5SE reliability


After reading the glowing revieuw on the Stereophile-website by Brian Damkroger on the ARC REF5SE there was a comment that: quote: by Audioware on nov 15, 2012,

"These pres are outstanding. However the problem is their poor reliability. 06 (six) of them were already on my services bench this year to fix problems with the transformer that feeds the dgital, the remote control and the on-off switch, circuits. It is a small xformer below the circuit board that burns out frequently. Another very serious problem is with the 6H30s filament regulators that do not stand for the increased current demanded by the new 6H30s intead of the old 6922s. ARC has to pay more attention to these problems!"

I already checked my dealer, who was really surprised and did not recognise these problems.

Comments will be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
sequence56

Showing 4 responses by anwar

Hi all, I am a new ARC Ref 5SE user. It has about 73 hours now, connected to McIntosh MC452 amp. While I am happy with its sound quality and how Ref 5SE integrates with the rest of my system, I am wondering if other users experience any over heating problem. My Ref 5SE runs really hot until it damaged the wood shelf above it. I was told the clearance was not enough, so I changed to longer legs, now having 3" clearance between the top of Ref 5SE and the wood shelf above, but still it runs very hot. If used longer than 3 hours, even the volume control knob becomes hot. Is this normal? Thank you.
The ARC importer in my country told me 3-4" clearance is fine but they recommended ventilation fan. I added PC chassis 12VDC cooling fan (quiet type) at the side of the Ref 5SE (open shelves, not closed) and it helps cool down the preamp.
Bifwynee, my Ref 5SE output goes to Bryston 10B-SUB, then to McIntosh MC452 (driving Focal Utopia 3 Diablo) and JL Audio Fathom f113.

I contacted Ron C of McIntosh through email and he confirmed ARC preamps work well with McIntosh amps. But no success contacting ARC technical support yet due to time zone (I am in Malaysia) as no ARC email contact is available.

After adding the Cooler Master 12V PC chassis fans (1200rpm and they are really quiet) at the left side of Ref 5SE, no more over heating issue.
I don't want to hijack this thread as my original question was about how hot the Ref 5SE runs.

I want to correct a few things here. JL Audio f113 single-ended input impedance is 10k Ohms (balanced unspecificed). But the f113 sub was never connected directly to Ref 5SE but to Bryston 10B-SUB active crossover.

So here are my connections:

Ref 5SE ====> Bryston 10B-SUB XLR (impedance=20k)
10B-SUB low pass ====> JL Audio f113 (10k or 20k unknown)
10B-SUB hi pass ====> McIntosh MC452 (22k)

I've tried connecting Ref 5SE directly to MC452, then f113 to MC452 output, that means only one set of REF 5SE output used. There is no difference to 5SE running temperature. But I noticed less background noise.