Any reliability horror stories out there?

OK, OK, engaged fingers before engaging brain. Didn't mean to bash the French... Hell, I'm a beeeg fan of their wine & cheese industries. I seem to recall their satellite launch vehicles have a pretty stellar rating too.

In my defense, that micromega sucked horribly as far as reliability went, and its the only French component I've ever owned. (At the time, it wasn't cheap either.) Also was having bad memories of a 2CV that left me stuck in the country and a beautiful French sink that was engineered so that when you turned on the taps at anything more than a trickle, the water rebounded off the front side of the basin and drenched your shirt. Probably not enough to generalize from. ;)

I dropped Audiomeca from my line due to the inordinate frequency of reliability problems.

Truth is that is a CD player and fact is unless you buy a tank from some manufactures like Wadia or someone in that range they are going to have basically a cheap knock off's internally for the most part, I do remember micromega was horrible, but I am sure that every country has there Micromega machines being produced, I AM in no way defending the french by any means, but French and German engineering in Audio is honestly some of the best I have seen or experianced in Audio components Including Sound is normally extreme to where you ask yourself what was the crap I was listening too?.. But Good old U.S. has some very sweet pieces as well, candian stuff aint half bad, japan has some great reliability but I have not found anything in the highend sound that I like from them in general. But for some reason French and German Voicing character in audio seems to be some of the best to me. Englands not to bad either, but normally you can get too much british sound depending on the mix, sometimes equating to "Dark".

not audio related but the sony play station 2 has got to have the worst record out of anything ever made.

mike.

Audio Alchemy gear functioned sporadically. On a good day it all worked, transport, DTI Pro32, DAC, and sounded pretty good. On a bad day it took a lot of fiddling around to get everything to lock.