My close vision is shot out to about 5 feet. I need a boom magnifier (and my glasses) for close work on little stuff. But then it's no big deal. Consider yourself fortunate, if you're near or beyond my age (50).
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Modern micro amps - disposable?
- Thread starter toddbooster
- Start date
Passinwind
I know nothing.
- Dec 3, 2003
- 23,079
- 46,050
- Disclosures
- Designer/Toaster Tech @ Passinwind Electronics
I'm 62. My uncorrected vision is terrible, but with progressives I can still do OK. And yeah, I do consider myself quite lucky.
There was a time when some class D bass amps weren't great on longevity. A learning curve was there. I have an older one (10 years?), made by a well-respected company that you've all heard of, which quit. I called and sent it in for repair. The tech called and explained that the part that broke is an obsolete piece (part of the power supply) which showed to be somewhat be unreliable and so they changed the design. Mine could not be retrofitted with the new parts, because several other things were changed in the redesign. He then said that he had a few of the old part left in his drawer and offered to fix it for free, even though I was not the original owner and it was far beyond warranty. And said it would likely fail again within a couple of years. Or it might never fail (I haven't used it much since). He then went on to offer me an almost unbelievable deal on a new, updated model. I declined.
Anyway, I've yet to read about any failed updated models from this company.
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One of the tools current techs prize is great optics.
One of the guys I work with (and he's near 60) has spent some serious money on jeweler's optics and lights his bench to beyond daylight levels. He's had a ball over the years mastering the use of hot air techniques. His work is amazing. His attitude is infectious. He's passed on that the hardest part was building the eye - hand skills when working with optical magnification.
I'm of the opinion that today's gear will be very long lived without service.
One of the guys I work with (and he's near 60) has spent some serious money on jeweler's optics and lights his bench to beyond daylight levels. He's had a ball over the years mastering the use of hot air techniques. His work is amazing. His attitude is infectious. He's passed on that the hardest part was building the eye - hand skills when working with optical magnification.
I'm of the opinion that today's gear will be very long lived without service.
I believe there are variables or more than one shade of gray here. Some manufacturers will create products that will end up in the dumpster for sure. I remember the replacement board costs for the markbass amps were almost as much as an amp. I think the jury is still out on how these micros will fair over the long hual many years from now. Im quite sure I will be corrected on this remark but 1 it will not change what I think and 2 Im not selling somethibg. IMO we bass players dont necessarily need a 5 pound amp but one that is reasonable to carry without a struggle not sure how we go to the point of builds that weigh almost nothing. YMMV.
I learned the hard way the first time I soldered under a microscope about 15 years ago. It didn't really phase me at first just how close my fingers were to the solder tip under the scope - until I started to smell burnt flesh. Then I realized I was only a few thousandths of an inch and it looked like a fair distance under the scope...
My 4 year old MB Fusion developed an intermittent "fading out" problem. Common sense isolated the problem to the preamp. It took a while for my local tech to locate a loose solder point but only seconds to repair. $52 Great CS assistance from GK as well. Yes, they're fixable - in this case anyway.
You represent a "premium" brand, and work in the US. Please widen your scope a bit, to include other brands and the rest of the globe. I have a bit of insight in the music gear service business in Sweden, which probably is a typical example of a western, non-US country. Quality and supply of qualified MI electronics repair is dwindling. Why?
Well, first of all, margins and prices on new gear is dropping, leaving less budget to hire and supply a service organisation. Finding good staff is hard, as many people that are interested in advanced technology prefer other business (like computers and industrial electronics) and those that are interested in MI gear often lack the competence, motivation and interest to work with PWM/SMPS, SMT, digital setups, new soldering methods etc.
Model series tend to have a short life and the selection is as wide or wider than ever.
We agree that one often needs more hardware to work on the new stuff; service manuals that were "nice to have" when working on traditional gear might be an absolute must now, along with break-out-boxes, wire looms for trouble shooting, bench mounted "vices", magnifying lenses and lights, more advanced scopes (to trouble shoot HF signals in SPMS) etc.
There is also a higher demand in general, on the technincians, as they BOTH need to know how to repair old, "immortal" tube amps, conventional amps from the 80s and up, as well as new micros.
Add to this, what seems to be a general decline in the interest in "playing in a band", plus a rich supply of used non-micro, quality gear; EBS, SWR, Trace Elliot, Fender, Marshall, Yamaha, GK etc.
On top of it, shipping is fairly expensive.
Sooo...
Slightly exaggerated; there is a picky but shrinking crowd of potential buyers, a lot of good, used gear, shrinking margins and sales volumes on new stuff, which has shorter product life cycles and requires additional training, documentation and hardware to be serviced. Recruiting service technicians is harder than before, as fewer people want to work with this and requirements are tougher.
As a whole, this leads to less and less interest (from both customers and industry!) in repairing new gear once warranty has expired. It is not my "opinion", it is a fact, at least in this country.
Somewhat ironically, the convenience and novelity of the modern mini bass amps guarantees that some of them still get repaired at an eventual failure. But a four year old, six channel mixer? A "prosumer" sound card? A generic 2x300W PA amp for the rehearsal room? They are not getting repaired, just replaced.
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I would like to add a recent example I experienced myself. I was looking for a power transformer for my Fender TBP1 bass preamp. Fender in US would not sell one to me, but referred to the Swedish importer, Fender Scandinavia. I had the part number I needed, and e-mailed them. No response, even after a reminder. An initial phone call then seemed promising, but they did not come back to me. Finally, after a fourth call, I was informed that the transformer was only available for warranty repairs. When I told the Fender guy, these units are probably ALL out of warranty since years (it is a legacy product), I was offered to buy a transformer for over $500! It is a $50 part, at least in comparison to other, similar transformers.
While not a micro amp, this attempt to just buy a spare part for a "premium" product is typical to the business' after sales support. Insufficient product knowledge, unprofessional customer management, laughable (or depressing!) spare part prices and no interest in promoting the long term brand image.
In my view, internet forums and knowledge sharing is actually FAR more important to repair equipment. Places like TB, eda boards, various gear pages etc offer actual repair instructions by people that have done the job, along with replacement suggestions for obsolete parts and general upgrade ideas, like quiet fans, temperature monitoring and so on.
While not a micro amp, this attempt to just buy a spare part for a "premium" product is typical to the business' after sales support. Insufficient product knowledge, unprofessional customer management, laughable (or depressing!) spare part prices and no interest in promoting the long term brand image.
In my view, internet forums and knowledge sharing is actually FAR more important to repair equipment. Places like TB, eda boards, various gear pages etc offer actual repair instructions by people that have done the job, along with replacement suggestions for obsolete parts and general upgrade ideas, like quiet fans, temperature monitoring and so on.
Lol...I do that most days, over the years my visual aids have got stronger and my soldering equipment smaller!
15 years ago I built a computer (dual Pentium 3 1GHz, 2GB ram) that was in service for 10 years. It out lived 3 of my wife's Dell new computers. When it finally died, I priced out a replacement and found that I could have a Dell Precision (read: business workstation, not home computer) for 1/4 the cost plus it came with a 3 year unlimited, next business day warranty.
About 1.5 years later, I started experiencing unexplained issues to the point a clean install on new hard drives would not help. I call up Dell and the next day they replace the motherboard. Problem still existed but was told to give it a couple of days before I called again. After a week, I called again and a different guy comes out to replace the motherboard. Still experiencing the same problem and a couple of new ones. After 3 motherboards, 2 Xeon processors, a new cad/cam video card Dell drew the line in the sand saying that they wouldn't replace the 12GB or ram or the riser cards and that there was nothing more they were going to do because I cost them too much money. Keep in mind I still had over a year left on the unlimited, next business day warranty.
After a couple of phone calls from my lawyer to Dell, the computer was replaced but instead of a warranty, it was only covered until the existing warranty ran out. Even though that was a newer version with upgraded hardware, the thing completely died without warning in a little over a year - literally days after the warranty expired.
Companies are banking on people to ditch their old products for the new and improved version before they realize that there isn't a long lifespan. Why do you think that Apple comes out with a new version of their old phone every 6 months? People buy new phones because they want the latest and greatest, not because it will last for 20 years.
Those are no cheapshots. You quote your tech, who imo is in the wrong here and got corrected by someone who builds and designs amps.
I did that for a living for quite some time. Not on amps, but on other devices the company I worked for build themselves. It's easy if you got the right tools. There are special heatguns to desolder smds. The soldering itself is no problem.
Those are the hardest, because their pins are inwards.
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You got that right there is more new gear consumed here than I can keep up with. Someone comes out with the latetest and greatest and the last latest is in the classifieds and on and on. We play our gear not music.
I don't know if it was the right way to do it, but I snipped the pins, pulled out the chip carrier, then removed the pins, one at a time, with soldering iron and tweezers. I could see that installing a new chip would be impossible, so I ran wires up to a socket and used the DIP version of the chip as a replacement. It was going into a computer, not a portable device, so I knew it didn't have to be super robust.
You'd be surprised how straightforward reworking a SMT loaded board is with the right tool, training, and some practice. I'm not very good working with itty bitty components, but most of the lab techs at work wouldn't give a second thought to swapping out any of the components from your picture.
While it may look intimidating, working with SMT is a learned skill, and doesn't require and super human abilities. It does require some slightly better tools than you can get away with when doing through hole, though.
I am truly baffled by amp techs who refuse to learn how to work with SMT. They're going to put themselves out of business that way, or put themselves into a very small niche of repairing antique amps.
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Again it is with the cost. A qualified, trained tech costs probably 4 times what a gut trained to carry the broken one to the dump does.
Hehe I do this daily (and even smaller!) plus BTC LGA and BGA packages. But again it's part of my job and I've been doing it a long time (engineering tech for an R&D radar development company). I'll be honest I'd rather repair/replace SMT parts over through hole any day of the week!
hasbeen
Commercial User
- Sep 23, 2004
- 4,810
- 2,687
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- Executive Vice President, The Adam Hall Group
that isn't 100% correct. He knows more about designing and building them. I know more about torturing, destroying and burning them up. Just ask him.
Again, it is not the technology per se that is problematic (especially for someone with your qualifications), it is the fact that there is a big imbalance between cost (and availability) of personnel, training, additional equipment and documentation against quick depriciation, short production runs and a stagnant or shrinking market. There are no winners in this game.
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