Convinced of your belief, you are being harsh and extreme, IME. You also have no basis to claim the converse-that every 1990's McCormack amp has either failed or is on the verge of failing. IMO, kchamber's viewpoint is likely more realistic. I can not think of too many consumer products that have had a 100% failure rate, not even the dreaded Yugo.
Don’t buy used McCormack DNA 1990s amps
This is a public service announcement. There are some yahoos on other sites selling 1990s McCormack DNA amps, sometimes at ridiculous prices. While they’re great amps, and I happily owned a DNA 0.5 RevA for 20 years, they’re all gonna fatally fail. Why? Because their input board is at the end of its useful life, and when it fails your amp is dead and not repairable by anyone — not even SMcAudio. It’s a boat anchor. The only option is to sell it for scraps or get an SMcAudio upgrade that’ll cost around $2000. Given my love of my amp I chose to do full upgrades given what else I could’ve gotten for the same same price and just got it back and will forward thoughts if anyone cares. But the purpose of this post is to warn off any prospective buyers of a circa 1990s DNA amp that it’ll fatally fail soon, so unless you get a great price and plan on doing the SMcAudio upgrades just avoid these amps on the used market. You’ve been warned.
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You're correct I pulled that number out of my butt, using nothing but my 35yrs of experience designing and working on electronics in semiconductor manufacturing and research. Guess what? Krell & Levinson amps of the same vintage are also very failure prone. In fact, probably more so for some models due to heat stress. The people buying those 30yr old amps for kilobucks do not seem to care? Does that make you angry too? Anyone that is really concerned about one of these DNA amps failing should invest in having a true DC protection circuit installed by a competent tech. That includes the new input boards that SMc is selling because they do not have true DC output protection either. The DC protection in the older DNA amps is only an input muting circuit.
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I'm located near Dallas. I mainly do work for local audiophiles because I work as a research engineer M - F so this audio work is done in my spare time. I do some work on Acurus and Aragon preamps for folks around the country. I have a set of specific upgrades for those preamps. I used to take in various amps from people around the country but it became too much for me to keep up with so I had to stop taking in amps. I now only accept amps from local audiophiles. I have a full array of test equipment and can fully test amps up to over 1000WPC on my bench using an Audio Precision analyzer. |
Yes, you pulled that number outta your butt. But you don’t have 35 years working with McCormack amps, nor did you design or build them. I’m spreading info from the guys WHO ACTUALLY BUILT THE AMPS. Tell u what — I’ll go back to the guys WHO ACTUALLY BUILT THE AMP and tell you why you’re absolutely wrong.. |
@nymarty I would direct the funds towards a purchase of a new amp and noy have the old DNA modded. @soix looks like you’ve taken on a function of being a proxy for SMc Audio to deliver a message of vested interest. No one can possibly predict when the amplifier is going to fail and I don’t recall reading much about these amps becoming boat anchors all of a sudden. |
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