New Marshall pedals

[drewl]

I also have for repair a noisy Marshall EH-1 delay pedal.....ooohh the future is here and it's not pretty!
microscopic surface mount parts/chips on cheap boards with flimsy ribbon cables and cheap pots/jacks/switches......look like throwaway items....

[Enzo]

As an authorized reppair center for many brands, I can tell you the DO NOT REPAIR - EXCHANGE ONLY warranty lists are growing fast. And not just tiny stuff.

[Amp Kat]

No doubt and Fender gave me a list of gear that they said don't even think about these ! Everyone is doing it and it sucks as the workmanship and ease of getting to the problems is worst. Lot's of solder joint problems and connection stuff. Not trying to pick on anyone in particular but EDEN's new Bass amps are stupidly cheap and poorly designed compared to their older stuff which was stout and double sided pcb boards and build real well. They still charge the same price and still don't have good tech support for techs nor will they give you schematics for them. It's a whole new ballgame out there fellows.

[drewl]

fortunately at work we have state of the art equipment for dealing with surface mount pc's and microscopes for soldering etc. but it's still a pain in the arse.
Then again I did a rush job today on a hand wired point to point boutique amp from a well known maker who shall remain nameless that is more of a pain to work on due to it's extavagent and idiotic layout then any pc board you can imagine!

[R ski]

On the plus side SMT is cheaper to produce, it makes our PC's affordable
and other electronic wonders. Repair isn't easy, throw away is fashionable.

Yup those hand assembled botique amps that are fruits of labour and
even those discrete amplifiers of a few decades ago cant compete
against SMT in todays consumers.

[Amp Kat]

SMT boards in production use a machine called pick and place. The boards are screened and solder pasted first and any thru holes are sealed up with a paste to keep the solder from filling them up. Then after the pick and place machine places the SMT components on the board it gets sent thru an oven that solders the components to the board and then sent to the thru hole crew and down the assembly line for further production. If there is a mistake which there usually is because your dealing with cheap labor here that runs these machines you can run into lots of time troubleshooting the boards until you find it. The hardest is a wrong value on a capacitor as many look the same. Rework stations like the EDSYN 1036 are used to fix and remove chips but you do have to have a serious magnifying glass and a good pair of tweezers to work with and experience using the rework station. Those large processors with a microscope as stated are a real pain indeed but fortunately don't fail very often. SMT is not a good idea for guitar amps except for DSP and any other signal processing because of the power issues however they are getting better with technology as far as power ratings on the components but still have a ways to go.