@minorl
Big mouth (me) is back again to shed some additional light. I got charged $140 for the initial troubleshooting. This is their normal hourly rate. My guess is that it took them around 1 hour to identify the problem.
This is when they identified the 2 defective chipsets.
So my question is how could you come up with a 14 hours of labor time, if you found the problem in around 1 hour?
The Classé Audio amp is well designed and modular.
I opened up the amp cover to give a look at the location of these chipsets.
To get access to these 2 chipsets will take an experienced technician a maximum of 1 hour. To unsolder/resolder the 2 chipsets, another hour. To put back the PC board back in place another hour. Testing + warmup + bias adjustments around 2 hours. So around 5 hours of repair time.
How do I know this? I am a certified telecommunications technician and owned a telecommunications equipment repair facility for 9 years specializing in Cable TV equipment. The gear I repaired included RF amplifiers, line power supplies, spectrum analysers, modulators, frequency processors , satellite receivers, field strength meters, etc. I repaired test gear during those 9 years and never spent more than a day on the most difficult repair tasks.
Why did I not repair my amp myself you may ask? I did not want to get personnaly involved in this repair, since I am retired from the workforce and do not have access to test gear. So this is when I decided to send the equipment to United Audio.
