Reliability - what’s your experience been?


I’ve been into high fi since the 1970’s. Fortunately, equipment breakdown has been few and far between.

As best as I can recall, I needed the following repairs:

1- new motor on a Thorens turntable (noisy motor)

2- Repair of an Aiwa tape deck (noisy channel)

3- Bryston amp (broken power switch)

4- Proceed amp (would not turn on)

5- CAL cd player (noisy channel)

6- Bricasti dac (no sound- just static)

7- Simaudio cd player (failed transport)

8- Pass integrated amp (intermittent noise)

not bad for almost 50 years experience. How has your experience been?

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Starting out, almost everything I bought was defective. Fortunately things have improved in the last 5 years to 50%  maybe 70% okay.

In about 30 years of enjoying HIFI the only repair issue I’ve needed was a dead meter on a Pass INT60 integrated amp. Pass repaired the meter quickly at minimal cost, and the customer service was great. I also have a few higher end Rega pieces that have never given me any problems. Rega has a lifetime warranty on all their stuff, and has US based repair locations. 

@immatthewj  From memory the V12R was rated at 100w /channel. Yes, a lot of tubes, but a very cute looking amp in its deep red finish...

@immatthewj From memory the V12R was rated at 100w /channel. Yes, a lot of tubes, but a very cute looking amp in its deep red finish...

@rooze , the stereo version of the V12 (at least my V12 I) is rated at 50 wpc in triode mode and 100 wpc in ultralinear. I was thinking that the monoblocks version would be twice that?

And yes, they are beautiful amps.

For example, when I sent in my CDP for repair this year, I made the unpleasant discovery there was nothing to fix, Rather, all my CDP's are defective. The repair shop, who also own what they service, discovered their CDP's are defective too, haha.