Preventive maintenance or wait till it breaks?


This is more focused on older gear- do you run gear until it's showing obvious signs of problems or do you do preventive maintenance before problems appear? I fall into the preventive maintenance side as I replace capacitors that are 20 or more years old. 
128x128zavato
Post removed 

Since I have repaired many products over the past 20 years, the majority of issues are not from the capacitors but mainly from circuit boards.  They become brittle and the solder traces begin to break.  So repairing that issue means running jumper wires underneath the boards.  Then once those are repaired, other issues seem to pop up.  Mostly all this is because of heat and smaller case designs.

As far as replacing parts, you should hear issues as they go bad.  Noise, distortion, hum, fuses blowing, etc.  I don't think you need to do preventative maintenance.  I am not sure if parts quality was better back then versus today, but some parts today are better sounding such as copper capacitors, and some resistors like Vishay, caddock, shinkoh, etc.  Most manufacturers do not use high end audio capacitors.  You won't open up a component with Duelands or V-Caps in there that is for sure.

As far as finding a good repair tech, that is more trial and error.  I have been fair with my repair pricing but it also gives me issues when I repair a component and say the estimate is X and then I find other issues especially with older component repairs.  It is also not my main source of income so I can be cheaper with my pricing but it may also take me a little longer.


Happy Listening.

Maintenance requirements vary according to environmental factors. Cigarette smoke is one of the worst fiends. That, along with high humidity and airborne dust create a layer of foul-smelling crud on everything. This wreaks havoc with convective cooling and throws finely tuned circuits out of tolerance. Every vintage piece of equipment I buy gets torn down, vacuumed, dusted with a small artist’s brush and cleaned of any flux residue etc... after that things look better, smell better and work better and longer. 
Bryston service is excellent. I've had an amp repaired- the turn around time was amazing. I also had a preamp refurbished- at no charge.