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?

128x128zavato

@immatthewj From memory the V12R was rated at 100w /channel. Yes, a lot of tubes, but a very cute looking amp in its deep red finish...

@rooze , the stereo version of the V12 (at least my V12 I) is rated at 50 wpc in triode mode and 100 wpc in ultralinear. I was thinking that the monoblocks version would be twice that?

And yes, they are beautiful amps.

For example, when I sent in my CDP for repair this year, I made the unpleasant discovery there was nothing to fix, Rather, all my CDP's are defective. The repair shop, who also own what they service, discovered their CDP's are defective too, haha.

My experience over the last 40+ years along my audio journey:

Sony CD/DVD players - not so good. Nearly every player (5) failed after very little use.

Bryston, 3B - I bought used; it had a switch go bad 10 years n on it's 20 year warranty, I sent it in and it was fixed cleaned and parts upgraded - no charge. Good equipment, incredible warranty and great service.

Tandberg cassette player - sent in for repairs (eating tapes) 3 times. I finally gave up and replaced it with a Nakamichi ZX-9, no problems with it

Audible Illusions Modulus, tubed pre-amp - nearly 40 years old and 0 problems. it still works and sounds great.

Krell KST-100 power amp - I bought used, but it was less than two years old when the caps in the left channel failed. Even though I wasn't expecting warranty, the service person at Krell was less than friendly and said they no longer service that model and had no suggestions where to get it fixed, but they would be happy to sell me a new model. A complete different experience than I had with Bryston. New or used I'll never buy another Krell.

Quad ES-63 - I had for over 15 years, sounded beautiful and never a problem. I loved those speakers.

Over the years I've had a lot of speakers and electronics, and over all, had very few problems.

Jim 

 

@immatthewj  my CDP did not play clearly on certain songs. So sent it in for repair. The repair guru has the same CDP and once I brought the noise issue to his attention and he tried the same songs, he could hear it on his CDP as well. So he told me there was nothing to fix and it was a design error. Go figure.