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bugera 333xl schemaics ????

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  • #16
    There has been a dramatic shift in buying habits and expectations over the last 30 years and companies are responding to it. One thing long gone is fair trade laws that had manufacturers able to set prices that all dealers had to sell for as a minimum. Before those policies were made illegal, a small dealer had a protected margin and could afford to have the buying experience itself be the main reason to buy from dealer A instead of Dealer B. That meant if your amp broke, the in-house tech would resolve it immediately, or even come to you to take care of a problem, and offer a free loaner, music lessons, etc. It also meant that competent adults could be employed, and every small town could support local shops the dispensed expertise and loyalty inducing benefits.
    Fast forward to current day, price is all that matters, mail order, to save local taxes, is enough to cause wholesale destruction of the concept of locally owned small businesses, personal service and expertise. With price being the only criteria for a sale, a 18 year old kid with no product or field knowledge is all that is needed to move boxes out the door or in the mail order shipping department. So, Behringer figures that he will have customers beating down his door if he offers very low prices. It worked in musician gear as well as it worked in all aspects of consumer marketing, price trumps all. People might complain if there is a lack of services but it does not stop them from seeking the lowest price as if there is no tomorrow or need for support, or even making an informed decision.
    The Mackie law suit was the stuff of legend, no details have been released of the final agreement but Mackie did not win except some PR by posting a flamboyantly untruthful court petition on the web. The assumption was that Mackie mixers were reverse engineered and sold as Behringer, the forums were full of people swearing they took apart 8bus Mackie's and Behringer 9000 and found identical pc boards copies right down to the mistakes and initials of Mackie designers. That of course was hogwash, there was a great deal of difference in the designs and layout. I was probably one of the few people at the time with schematics for both and knew it was all a Mackie disinformation campaign. Mackie lawyers approached me trying to get Behringer serivice info but I just told them that if they did manage to find it somewhere, it would be embarrassing to them after claiming in court the two products were identical, or even very similar.
    Mackie was a company with one good idea and tried to milk it too long and the market rejected them for the same reason Mackie captured the small mixer market 8 years before..... dropping the price drastically for a given number of input channels. The 1604 crushed Soundcraft, and a dozen other smalll mixer companies by being 1/3 the price, which set a new expectation for cost/features ratio. Several years later Behringer does the same thing but not just to Mackie, but many fields and common brands such as compressors and speakers. Price is all that matters for that segment of the market, the segment with the most upside potential. A dozen Chinese based companies are trying to do the same with Behringer but it is just muddying the waters.
    A good amp cost 1 month gross salary in 1970. A similar amp now costs 2 Days gross salary, but with the greatly lowered relative price, support and customer service have disappeared for the most part. That is the model consumers want, it must be because that is the segment that gives rewards in growth and profits.
    By all rights, an amp built to last 30 years, with after sale support and personal service still can be had, by the few people who care about those extras. Boutique amps for $5000 are still a bargain compared to 1970 prices in terms of gross income to pay for it. Since most people do not even consider a high quality, high personal service product, they much not really care. That is what Behringer was betting on and he won. Personally I think that a lot of Behringer units are better than their reptuation, and a true bargain. I have a few old compressors and a digital mixer still that are quite good. The compressors were $89 and used a very similar circuit as dbx costing 4 times as much...both patterned after the application notes from the gain cell IC maker.

    Getting any parts or independent service after warranty that many countries do not have. Here in Russia the two importers of all the pro audio gear refuse to allow any parts, service information or even after warranty repair at all. They have taught a lot of stores and pro audio users to believe that when something breaks after warranty, the only recourse is buying a new one. There are few if any repair shops because there are no parts available.

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    • #17
      I guess I'm like one of those wooly mammoths then-extinct but too dumb to realize it. It really is all about first cost. To tell the truth, it's evident even to me that there are a lot of amps around that are uneconomic to repair. I don't think anyone has ever brought me, or even asked about, repairing anything by Crate or Line 6. For the price of a couple or hours of shop time, people can just go and get another one.

      On the other hand I think that there's a certain amount of stratification going on. The people here are obviously intelligent enough to understand all of what we're discussing, and respond to that with intelligent choices. The people who buy cheap expendable gear are, for the most part, not involved in discussions of this type. It's like Jean Shepherd once observed, we're fighting monsters that most people don't even know exist.

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      • #18
        I don't want to harp on it here PD, my disagreement is not with your desire for documentation. My disagreement is with your assumption.

        Look at it the other way. Fender schematics usually have a disclaimer pointing out that the drawing is proprietary and not to be copied or isued without written permission from Fender. And yet down in the bottom of the amp, along with the warranty card and bumper stickers was a copy of the schematic, thrown in for all to see.

        Now you yourself might see that and yell "YAY" to the world. I also think it will be handy to have. But 99.9999% of potential customers won;t even know or care that it is there. It means nothing to them anyway. I seriously doubt more than 1 sale out of 100,000 has anything to do with the presence of that print in the bottom of the amp.

        So when you say you don;t understand what kind of business model is based on unhappy customers, I have to say that is begging the question. Customers are not unhappy because their amp didn;t come with a schematic. That factory makes amps they think the customer will want. Customers are unhappy if their amp doesn;t work, or if it sounds crappy. But they don;t open the box and slap their forheads and cry, "I can't BELIEVE there is no schematic here."


        Now in defense of your position, when someone calls or drops in with a Line 6 product, I right away tell them the company will provide zero support in either parts or technical data. And it is possible I may have to bail out without fixing it. I have to charge for my time, and reverse engineering the circuits would be too expensive for a repair ticket. And if someone asks me what I think when they are choosing between a Peavey and a Line 6, you bet I will be honest and tell them that the PV can be serviced all over the world in one of their MANY authorized repair shops, and that ANY independent shop can still get parts and documentations for after-warranty repairs as well, compared to the Line 6 which is limited to a few authorized shops scattered around and no outside support. It matters to me and is a valuable consideration in making a purchase decision.

        So please don;t confuse my defense of the Bugera policies with me liking them.
        Education is what you're left with after you have forgotten what you have learned.

        Comment


        • #19
          Good points on there, Enzo. As was said here, our little niche here is the kind of people that a schematic really matters. I will say, I love having the schematic around for Fender amps, and the like, so that way if a friend comes to me, I can actually get to diagnosing quickly, rather than tracing circuits. I have a little Vox AD15VT amp that was cut into a head. All I want to ever do is popping out that tube. All the IC's and such on the modeler just scare the bejeebees out of me.

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          • #20
            No disagreement there, E.

            I just like to be able to fix things. It's my way of asserting my autonomy and independence-as well as green livin'.
            My technical training was in the aircraft engine repair business. There, you start with documentation because it's part of the certification process and you can't operate without it.

            Making stuff that's intended to be tossed is OK if it's a consumable but I haven't gotten to that point with amps.

            I can tell you that with cheapos it is really fun to pull them back from being consigned to the dumpster. Often the fix is pretty simple, related to cheap accoutrements and indifferent assembly.

            Maybe they spoiled me in the aircraft business?

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            • #21
              Well, in the aircraft business peoples' lives depend upon it working. If a guitar amp craps out, no one dies. Well, not usually.
              Education is what you're left with after you have forgotten what you have learned.

              Comment


              • #22
                Speakin' of that, your schematic for the Sidekick Keyboard 60 is what pulled this one back from the dumpster.

                It was getting hysterical (loud thumping rumbling noises) and it seemed to be related to the bass and middle controls. I pulled the chassis and found two power supply resistors pretty well cooked, replaced them with the correct value, resoldered all the pot and jack connections to the board, put it all back together and spent a while carefully cleaning the controls. Sounds good.

                Thanks again.

                Comment


                • #23
                  Lives do depend on proper maintenance but that is not why people use licensed A/Ps, it is because of regulation. Regulations and licensing based on examinations really changes the dynamic of a market. That was the case back when the FCC required a license via examination to work on two-way radio or public service equipment. Prices were higher for service and there was a legal requirement for periodic service. That kept every hack who called themselves a tech out of the equation, and equipment needed to be fixable and stable so was built rugged and with high quality parts. But it also meant that having a 2-way system was accepted to be expensive to own and operate. That leveled the playing field and since everyone's price was moderately high, few people even noticed that 2-way radios were more than TVs or stereos. All costs are relative and are acceptable as long as everyone has to pay a similar amount.
                  When prices are easy to compare and low prices dominate promotion, someone has to be pretty motivated to spend 3 times as much for the same relative function. With sound equipment, the cheap stuff does generally work fine, they do meet spec, and that is enough for the majority of people. That difference between high end and low end was much more distinct in the past. A $50 amp in 1975 was crap, not matter how you evaluated it. Now, a $50 amp has technical capabilities that are not far removed from a $600 amp except possibly raw power. The competition is making value as good as the price. I like the old heavy iron but these cheap light weight designs using modern technology are pretty darned impressive.
                  Equipment is made disposable for many reasons, one is that there is no way to have a cost effective field service network. There are few shops who can turn out consistently high quality work for the amount of money set aside on the manufacturing end for life cycle maintenance. Behringer is a good example of a company that ran into that some time ago. The landed costs of a $100 retail unit was probably $25 before distributor margins and retail channel margins were added. That unit left the assembly line, before boxing/packaging, printing, storage, land and sea transportation and duties had to have been around $10. With that as the cost basis, how much of a loss is ANY type of 3rd party repair? Back in the early 2000s I developed a spreadsheet to try to convince the world headquarters how a parts network....that they did not have...would help costs. By the time I finished, the answer was clear, don't fix units below $150 in retail price. Also, don't buy parts and warehouse them, use junkers collecting in shops everywhere as parts storage units. The tech knows exactly where to find a replacement, just look on the same place on the pc board from a warranty replaced unit and use that. The total cost of maintaining a service network, and parts distribution would become 1/5 of what other manufacturers assume, and net better results. A policy was started soon after about stores replacing defective units below a certain cost.
                  That same model is working in other industries now. The two drivers for that are lack of qualified staff for repair and the high costs of doing repairs(transportation, facilities, parts systems, 3rd party servicers etc). In the past large corporations needing a large supply of qualified techs funded tech programs at hundreds of community colleges all over the country. After a while it became evident that the equipment just was too complex for the quality of graduates so those programs started shutting down and a lot of gear maintenance was shifted to assembly line style high volume repair depots where there was a concentration of parts and techs, but much lower number requirement. Now some of the big ones use a disposable module system in design to cut down even further in the dependence on less and less capable tech staff. Wages also lowered at each step. It is a Catch 22 cycle. Techs are less effective so pay rates drop, meaning less motivation for getting a proper educations or attracting people with diagnostic skills, which lowers the quality of the work force further. Companies like Aligent just do not employ the large number of qualified techs they used to because they can't find them, and design their equipment around that reality.
                  Even in such a hobby related field as pro audio there is an amazing lack of qualified techs, and those who are, are all nearing retirement. Do you know of a good diagnostician under 45 years old? I've not met one in years. However, 40 years ago, in pro audio that was the norm. There was a different life experience for young people 40 years ago. Fixing things was something they were exposed to from toddlerhood, combined with a post sputnik emphasis on science, math and engineering, that a lot of kids grew up with a mental tool kit of skills for cars, electronics, just about anything. In 1959 there was not a high school in the country that did not have an active amateur radio station or electronics classes as electives. Silicon Valley, the first wave was built by people who grew up in that environment. The first wave was high tech...non-computer, such as instrumentation, high-tech materials etc. You can read it in the forum, lots of young people who want to fix their own gear for cost reasons or tinkering but not many that bothered to go to the "library" to learn the background. There is a different mind set. Tinkering and dabbling is quite different than what their fathers and grandfathers did in the same fields.
                  When I owned a large shop, finding techs was the biggest hassle, those who had some qualifications usually had very limited breadth of knowledge so they could only be used on very specific types of work. I was in constant training mode and also spent most of my time walking between benches quickly diagnosing the problems and giving suggestions on resolving the problem, and explaining how and why. That is a big drain with 15 techs. For high volume units like ADATs, where we got pallets in daily, I set up a reverse assembly line with each step a higher level of technical understanding of the concepts and details. That worked really well but required optimizing a system for specific models, something depot maintenance can do but independent shops can't. For a while we were getting enough 9000 Behringer consoles for a limited version of that. One thing that was discovered by the line-style work was that prior tech actions were checked by the later ones and "defects" in service dropped to essentially zero. We very very seldom had a unit come back as not quite working right after repair.
                  Cheap throw away gear is here to stay and will become the norm in many fields from auto maintenance to computers, cell phones etc. Cars, as electrics become more mainstream will allow many ares of cost reduction....now only battery costs are higher than internal combustion powered vehicles. Whole modular sections will be swapped out in case of defects because no single subsystem will be very cost intensive. The days of techs diagnosing to small component level will soon be for hobbyists only since it makes no business sense.....in any field.

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                  • #24
                    Switch mode power supplies, surface mount components, dedicated ASIC controllers, embedded DSP....
                    The deathnell of tinkering!

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Actually that is half right, switching supplies are not as spooky as most people think, they are pretty easy to build but better yet, you do not have to. A 350watt supply runs about $30. Surface mount is easy and quite hobby friendly, but you need a good magnifying inspection light and tweezers instead of needle nose pliers. Once you get used to working on those scales, laying out pc boards and doing 1-offs is easier. The finished item is more rugged, reliable and cheaper...nothing wrong there.
                      So many techs hate surface mount because they have not played with it. Once they do they become more effective than working on the same sort of failures on through hole or point to point assembly. Desoldering and reusing parts is easy if proper technique is used. Hot air systems are getting cheap, and Chip-Kwik for those who do not want to buy gear, makes removing any sized parts fast and safe since low temperatures are used. I was showing my GF how to removed a 24 pin ADC yesterday. If it was through hole it would have possibly damaged the pads and device using conventional methods, and taken 5 minutes. I removed the flat pack in less than 10 seconds and it never hotter than 130 degrees F, so I just picked up to show her. The part was not bad, I just removed it to show her how it was done. Putting it back was just as fast with no damage to the board or chip.

                      There is a lot of hobby activity in systems nowadays. PIC processors, servo controllers, all sorts of software oriented tinkering so the details have changed but there is still a lot of tinkering going on. Now we just have a lot more choices, we can use a cheap IC to replace a whole pc board if we want or we can roll our own with discrete components. Test equipment for hobbyists has also gotten dirt cheap, DMMs with .5% on all ranges for $20, sound card scopes and spectrum analyzers for free or $40-400 for expanded input range. I still use a HP3580 because it tells me what I want to know in the spectrum I am interested in but it cost $5000 when new in the 1979 but for most people, their 16 bit sound card can do just as well, with a higher resolution for free up to 21khz, plus have a low distortion generator thrown in. Actually, these are the best times every for hobbyists but few people are involved with hands on hobbies nowadays. The Good Ol' Days are now but most do not realize it.

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                      • #26
                        I guess I just don't like the idea of throwaway anything. I try not to live my life that way. In fact I've met very few people who think it is a good thing, if they think about it at all.

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                        • #27
                          I hate SM stuff because I come from a field service background. GOod luck rummaging around the misc parts box to come up with something on the fly.
                          Education is what you're left with after you have forgotten what you have learned.

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                          • #28
                            Originally posted by Enzo View Post
                            I hate SM stuff because I come from a field service background. GOod luck rummaging around the misc parts box to come up with something on the fly.

                            I personally divide all manufacturers into three main categories, depending on their service policy:

                            1. Policy: Sending schematics/service manuals to authorized repair shops as well as free lance repair-men and customers. For example - Peavey.
                            Results: Authorized repair shops and free-lance repair-men can perform service
                            without facing problems. Unprofessional amateurs can make mistakes at their own risk.

                            2. Policy: Sending schematics/service manuals to authorized repair shops only. For example - notorious Behringer, Marshall and most of others.
                            Results: Authorized repair shops can perform service without problems; free-lance repairmen have problems and are forced to search documentation in forums.

                            3. Policy: Not sending schematics/service manuals even to authorized repair shops. For example Ensoniq, for the last year M-Audio and others.
                            These manufacturers offer to replace complete assembled boards (free of charge during the warranty period, and for a fee after).
                            Results: Service is available only in the authorized repair shops, but it’s very expensive after the warranty period expires. When manufacturer disappears (see Ensoniq), service is almost impossible even at authorized repair shops, since there are neither schematics nor spare parts.

                            In such case, I recommend customers not to purchase products by these manufacturers at all.
                            “Sort of the policy is simply a fact of life in the business” (Enzo), and nothing can be done…

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Originally posted by Enzo View Post
                              I hate SM stuff because I come from a field service background. GOod luck rummaging around the misc parts box to come up with something on the fly.
                              Surface mount is another universe.
                              What's up with surface mount capacitors that they are not marked?

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                Type 1 and 2 offer no impediment to having a unit kept working, there are always shops that have the data, even if some do not. For most companies the process is very easy to get warranty status. A few require appropriate equipment and minimum stocking parts purchases but Ensoniq, after seeing how much more hassle it was to find shops or tech who really were qualified to work on digital pc boards, made it a priority to allow customers to take their units to a local shop, so had to create a way that any tech could work accomplish the goal of getting the job done for the customer. They had fewer problems with shops mangling repairs that is seen with Korg and Roland and others, because the technology is just beyond 85% of the techs out there.
                                At least that was Ensoniq's intent, they never intended to fail as a company.
                                There are a lot of options for customers, for simple problems, take a unit to any shop, for more complex problems that benefit from a lot of specific experience on that model, a large warranty station is much better suited to getting the work done with the least down time and highest probability of doing it right.
                                Actually, if there is a need and a market for parts or refurbed boards for any discontinued model or company which folds, small specialty shops spring up. My shop rebuilt many boards as a product such as hundreds of switching power supplies for the ADAT when it was not available anymore. We rebuilt hundreds of headstacks on an exchange basis. Lots of shops bought them from us. I am sure there are shops redoing Ensoniq boards also, at least there were 6 years ago the last time I looked. I the unit is high volume someone is going to specialize in supporting it. Ensoniq came to the same conclusion about how to get the most consistent repairs as some of the most well known names in test instruments.
                                If it is very rare, than support probably is not available. But there are exceptions. Years ago I was impressed with the sound of the original Quantec QRS. It was an expensive rare piece of studio gear from the mid 80s. It was also very difficult to work on because it depended on precise timing in memory, and high speed communications between the 10 pc boards using a clock bus that also had all the multiplexed data being sent between boards superimposed on the clock line. No capture of the serial stream would mean anything. The company stopped supporting them when it reorganized so there were a bunch of these in hi-end studios that depended on its unique sound. I had to repair mine and reversed engineered it and gradually learned a great deal about it. I repaired a few for people and it got out that there was a source of support. It did not take long before I got calls from around the world asking for repairs and parts. The logic and memory chips were all obsolete types but finding surplus dealers with caches of them, I bought all I could find. They were time consuming so I did not want to encourage people to send them to me, I trained another tech how to fix them and he set up a little home business when getting home from work as an engineer at Dolby Labs.
                                If a unit is worth saving and the owner values it enough to find a specialist, almost anything can be repaired.

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