Reliability of Cary Audio Products

Ok - I could complain about a radio shack choke in my Rocket - but let's be honest - all chokes suck. All chokes should be easily replaceable in a couple of hours, because eventually they all fail.

"A mess of wire and not worth working on" though to me equals someone who is not familiar with tubes or point to point wiring philosophies and is NOT someone you want working on your three thousand dollar amp. Not seeing green boards and then saying "what a mess" is a sure sign you have the wrong technician. Most amps use smaller guage wire than you might think (most speakers use larger guage 18/16/14 and bigger caps) - usually 19 or 22amg - the Cary's use top o' the line 22amg Kimber and that's about $8. a foot (versus maybe I dunno $.20?), plus ceramic tube sockets and Kimber caps to start with.

A bad resistor is a classic story but not a bad one, and considering there are only about two dozen (high quality) ones in the whole amp, if you have an eletrical meter, which you should, just like it says in the manual, even if you are slow it can't take you more than half an hour to check all of them, and its almost always the one at the input tubes. It's a well known engineers very old way of protecting equipment: a resistor designed to fail that shuts down the amp during a power surge even when the fuses don't pop.

Kgturner nailed it. Some people just don't realize that the best of breed configuration of internal connections is point to point. To the untrained eye, colored circuit boards are awful impressive. Not to mention cheaper to manufacture and assemble. Well said..

Chris

My Cinema 11 has several problems with it's basic operation and it's only 2 years old. I know something about electronics. I've sold electronics and installed "high-end" home theater systems. I'm a 45 year old guy w/ a degree. Cary has treated me like I just fell of the turnip truck.

The people at the Cary service center are nice but have flat-out failed to recognize the problems with the C11. Denial? It's a lemon people.

I sent the unit back to them and they ignored the problems and sent it back to me saying it tested fine and I needed to check for ground loops.

Ground loops don't cause the volume control knob to fail, the remote to fail, popping noises when switching between inputs, and the unit strangely switching into 5.1 mode when removing your headphone jack. The service tech actually suggested I open the unit up and fix the volume control pot myself. It's under warranty!

I will not buy another Cary product. And I would recommend you stay away from the C11. The bugs may have been addressed with the C11a - I really don't know. Not going to chance it.

Ok, so the comment is from 5 years ago but it still deserves to be bashed

but let's be honest - all chokes suck.

A choke is nothing but a coil of wire wrapped around a core. They are one of the basic building blocks of passive electronic circuits. The choke provides inductance and the other 2 are resistance and capacitance.

Claiming they all suck is to be perfectly blunt....ridiculous.

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I have mostly cary products and have not had any issues, not to discount your issue by the way.