Reliability - what’s your experience been?


I’ve been into high fi since the 1970’s. Fortunately, equipment breakdown has been few and far between.

As best as I can recall, I needed the following repairs:

1- new motor on a Thorens turntable (noisy motor)

2- Repair of an Aiwa tape deck (noisy channel)

3- Bryston amp (broken power switch)

4- Proceed amp (would not turn on)

5- CAL cd player (noisy channel)

6- Bricasti dac (no sound- just static)

7- Simaudio cd player (failed transport)

8- Pass integrated amp (intermittent noise)

not bad for almost 50 years experience. How has your experience been?

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Showing 1 response by jwei

My worst equipment failure experiences have been with Classe gear.

Both a Classe basic amp the CA-100 and a Classe tuner the Tuner-1 failed at differeint times.  These were designed before the B&W acquisition of Classe, and the post-acquisition company would not provide service support -- no service locations, no replacement parts, no circuit schematics.

My impression was that not only did Classe products have dubious reliability, but also the company did not care about customers and could not be relied upon beyond the initial sale.

Of course, I vowed never to buy another Classe product.