I had a Classe’ CAP150 which went back and forth to Quebec and the US 3 times for cold solder joints. I sold it, as is. The other was Yaquin hybrid integrated amp which caught fire a couple of hours after first turning it on for the very first time. Good thing I was in the house as black acrid smoke started filling my upstairs office/listening room. I managed to get all 6 windows open after I yanked the power cord and put 2 fans in the windows, one blowing out and one blowing in. Luckily, the smoke wasn’t in the room more than maybe 3 minutes to do any smoke damage. I sent pictures to Yaquin in China but they wanted the amp back before giving me a partial refund. I tossed it in the trash instead as the cost to ship was half the price of the amp. Of course, the company said I must have hooked it up wrong. This amp was bought direct from China for around $190.00 plus the shipping. It was poorly made with wires just wired haphazardly and lots of sharp metal inside that could easily snag a wire. That was my first and last time I bought from China. This was around 2004-06 time frame and the company was pretty much unknown.
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?