Spending money on parts

[jrfrond]

OK, OK... I digress. You all know my peev with the rash of virtually disposable amps. Of course someone needs to fix the majority of them in the event of minor failures. And of course parts should be available. It is somewhat telling that they're not at this time. Like maybe my assesment is more accurate than we would like to admit??? And I do wish, if only for the sake of all those who DO repair these amps, that they were made more sevice friendly. Perhaps a trend in repairing them will have an affect on thier construction and parts availability...Eventually. One thing is sure. By turning a blind eye to the issue, as I have, NOTHING is going to improve or change.

Enzo, note that I said: "I couldn't possibly specialize in modern musical industry electronics repair because..." I'm not actually a face to face rude person. I probably wouldn't actually slap the sucker from a kids mouth. In fact I often surprise myself with my level of diplomacy in business. But that doesn't represent my position in this matter. I was just being expressive.

We've stemmed the tide of the disposable units actually seeing the city dump in a couple of ways. When we are instructed to scrap units by the manufacturer, e.g. small and/or cheap guitar amps, we WILL in fact perform the simple repairs that are often required (usually cold solder joints, a bad jack, switch or power IC; in the case of cheap tube amps, it's usually due to the crappy tubes), and take them home, give them away to friends, etc. For the bigger stuff, we have a couple of very resourceful Polish musicians who come around to take the units and fix them for themselves and their fellow Polish musicians in the community. Because time vs. $$$ is the predominant factor in a retail shop, and they have lots of free time to tinker, they can eventually repair the units..... or not. I've never actually really asked them. They extend their gratitude by performing the occasional impromptu accordian performance in the lobby and bring us a seemingly endless supply of Polish candy. It makes us feel that much better that we are helping them, as well as taking a slightly more "green" approach.

[Jazz P Bass]

Aahh!
Polish Candy.
This guy, in Clifton, NJ, rocks.
..:: Welcome to DELICJE Polish Candy Store ~ About Us

[km6xz]

One thing I have learned traveling around the world, you can make friends anywhere as long as you remember to sincerely praise their chocolate, beer, women or hospitality. Those items seems to be the criteria for judging a society where every you go.

[jrfrond]

One thing I have learned traveling around the world, you can make friends anywhere as long as you remember to sincerely praise their chocolate, beer, women or hospitality. Those items seems to be the criteria for judging a society where every you go.

Yes Stan, while avoiding all talk of church and state. :O

[Enzo]

CHuck, don't worry, you have my respect.


But thinking back we have had a steady trickle in this forum of atitude assholes whose main goal in life is to tell anyone who can;t avoid it that Crate amps never work or are not repairable, or something similar. And surely in your area are some guys who wouldn't dream of working on "that solid state crap, I am strictly tubes." Professionals don;t behave that way, but the attitude I was bemoaning does indeed exist out in the marketplace.

[km6xz]

Boy, that is right, when I hear claims of golden ears and how everything is beneath them if not done a certain esoteric way, red lights start flashing in my head knowing they are are trying to delude someone, either a client or themselves for some reason.
A throw away amp is better than none, and a good player will sound better than any guru of tube high end amps if not as skilled a player. There is a major market for low cost gear and it has every reason to exist, is usually more reliable without attention than the esoteric amps which often need frequent adjustments or repairs. if good music could only come for exotic gear, all the classics still trying to be copied to day would never had existed.
When a newbie is chided for having less than stellar tubes or caps in their amp, my first reaction after the red light stops to ask for their discography. Music knowledge of skill, tone or quality are empty talk, music is the act of doing music, everything else is bar stool bragging.
A typical failure rate in mid and low end get is less than 5% in any product line. Esoteric amps fail more often for various reasons but the most expected is that they are not well engineered for function, but for extremes. The same way a Toyota will have orders of magnitude higher reliability than a limited production exotic or hand made anything. They have different design goals and user bases. One thing that is evident is that in small scale production amps and hi-end hi-fi, there is a lot less solid engineering than smoke mirrors and magic dust which costs a lot more at retail than good practical engineering. It takes more skill and knowledge to produce a $100 practice amp that holds together 95% of the time than produce a prototype sold as the next in-thing with the latest internet hip parts.
I don't care what the amp or unit is, if it is on my bench it gets worked on with the same level of test precision and diagnostic skill as anything else. Except for the pixie dust, electronics and electrons are a lot more democratic than the gurus would have us believe.

[Jazz P Bass]

Quote" I don't care what the amp or unit is, if it is on my bench it gets worked on with the same level of test precision and diagnostic skill as anything else."
That statement, right there my friend, is what sets apart a true tech from a hack.
Whatever the repair business.
Aside: I had trouble with my telephone line since March of 2011.
5 service calls. We did this, we swapped these wires.
Understand it was an intermittant "crackling noise".
The 6th service call, two techs show up.
One is a women. And she is breathing flames.
"This is intolerable. We Will find the fault."
10 minutes later it was fixed.
She bypassed the whole street line and found the fault.

[km6xz]

Actually John, most places are quite undisturbed by discussions about church and state, but seldom talk about either for lack of interest. The two exceptions are Arab countries and the US, neither of which tolerate civil discussions about church or state.

It is much more fun to have random conversations with strangers in Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, South America and most of Asia because no one would be angry if someone expressed a different opinion.

[jrfrond]

Actually John, most places are quite undisturbed by discussions about church and state, but seldom talk about either for lack of interest. The two exceptions are Arab countries and the US, neither of which tolerate civil discussions about church or state.

It is much more fun to have random conversations with strangers in Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, South America and most of Asia because no one would be angry if someone expressed a different opinion.

I guess you've been out of the US long enough to let your guard down and open up, only to find that the locals are more chill about religion and politics. That's a GOOD thing!

Stan, you are correct that electrons and electronics are democratic. What is NOT so true there is the physical serviceability of some products, all the way from cheap up to boutique. We recently had a PTP boutique amp in here whose name I won't mention, in which the WAY it was laid-out and built was a plain pain-in-the-ass to service or even follow logically (hmmm..... many Boogies come to mind here too!). Just because it's relatively easy tube technology doesn't make it easier to troubleshoot if the layout is not logical. Of course, I am biased from years of servicing vintage Fender's and Marshall's practically with my eyes closed. So at one extreme, we have "flysh*t" surface-mount technology, and at the other, we have a PTP rat's nest, and everywhere in between. In that respect, I DO agree that spending a lot of $$$ on an amp is no guarantee of reliability, and even of good sound. I've heard many boutique amps that just sound so "contrived", with overdone multi-stage distortion and tone-shaping.

There's definitely a market for lower-cost amps. Not too many people can afford boutique amps, but most CAN afford proven performers like Fender's Hot Rod/Blues Deville/Deluxe series. And why not? They sound good and have held up well in the field.

[Chuck H]

I do understand your position. I won't even ask you to qualify it, but... I don't think that WRT guitar amps there is near as much snake oil as in the hi fi arena. To say that boutique amps have a higher failure rate than, for example, a Valve Junior or a Blues DeVille seems like a statement to serve your critique and not a researched or accurate one. You don't find as much cloth braid wire and carbon comp resistors in boutique amps as you once did. Real knowledge has made it's way to guitar amp designers far ahead of the gear forums and bar stools. The Mercury Magnetics transformer and NOS mustard cap crowd aren't the people making boutique guitar amps. I'll put a Fuch's, Bruno, Mission or one of my own builds up against any production guitar amp you can name for reliability every day and twice on Sunday. I've only sold six amps. I'm not really an amp company but one of my builds has had a little light on it so I get an occasional order from someone that want's one. My personal amp is the prototype and because of my style of playing it lives cranked and has been used that way for almost three years with NO failures. No complaints from any customers either.

I could start breaking down all the reasons why the "affordable" amps are more failure prone but it would be a redundant exercise. Some amps are built for longevity and to withstand diverse conditions and others are built for quick manufacture and to maximize somewhat lesser compnents. YES ther is a valid market for budget gear...AND there always has been. I can be as rash as anyone and admitted to that. But it's also true that while, for example, a BF Deluxe Reverb was made as cheaply as possible in it's era, the build quality and components were far superior to what qualifies that market today. Don't even try to deny that. A per capita comparison of units sold then and now and how many are still around, and working fourty or fifty years later will almost certainly support this position.

I just don't think it's fair to lump todays boutique amp companies in with the NOS mustard guys. I've met a few and they are smart, clever and practical designers making great products that absolutely deserve more respect than child labor built amps with particle board capinets, thin boards with thin traces, small transformers, marginally rated components and poorly plated jacks and switches. We don't have fifty years to wait for the truth of it but I personally don't need that long. You are certainly smart enough not either which is why your position troubles me. I admit to being a crank when it comes to the "affordable" gear market. So I try not to take myself too serious WRT that. But I do have to defend the merits of the other end of the market.

[Jazz P Bass]

Unfortunately, manufacturing will always be driven by the bottom line.
Guitar amps have been around for what, 50 some odd years.
Do or Die, the manufacturers that have the longevity or market share have found cheaper & cheaper ways to make that product.
Be it skimpy copper traces or thin nickel plating , it all comes down to money.
Welcome to capitalism.
I would love to see a "boutique" amp mass produced (by the boutique people, not Bearinger.(ie: Bogner)
Dollars to donuts the first few years the product will be as designed.
Then the bean counters enter the equation.
Or you get bought out.
Or the competition starts to hammer you (by going to cheaper components)
(or China)
Pretty darn soon the quality will start to slide.
Guaranteed.

[jrfrond]

Unfortunately, manufacturing will always be driven by the bottom line.
Guitar amps have been around for what, 50 some odd years.
Do or Die, the manufacturers that have the longevity or market share have found cheaper & cheaper ways to make that product.
Be it skimpy copper traces or thin nickel plating , it all comes down to money.
Welcome to capitalism.
I would love to see a "boutique" amp mass produced (by the boutique people, not Bearinger.(ie: Bogner)
Dollars to donuts the first few years the product will be as designed.
Then the bean counters enter the equation.
Or you get bought out.
Or the competition starts to hammer you (by going to cheaper components)
(or China)
Pretty darn soon the quality will start to slide.
Guaranteed.

Actually, Bogner has a deal with Line 6, not Behringer/Bugera.

A mass-produced boutique amp??? This strikes me as an oxymoron. Where do you draw the line? What constitutes boutique? If you take the Champion 600, a high-production Chinese tube amp, and reissue it as a PTP hand-built, it's suddenly boutique. If you take a boutique amp like Soldano and built it en masse in China, you have Jet City, a production amp with boutique roots, but a production amp nonetheless. However, the basic Soldano designs are modified Marshalls The original Boogies were a modified Fender design.

My point is: what makes it boutique? The price? The design? The components? The low production figures? Hand wiring? It's not a black-and-white issue. If the aforementioned points make it a boutique amp, then you could call ALL early tube amps boutique, for the most part.

There are some amps I've seen built in China that are actually fairly well-built. Jet City is one of them. My BIGGEST complaint are the cheap-sh*t components used and crappy Chinese tubes and sockets. However, Jet City has no corner on THAT market. This is my biggest gripe with EVERY company nowadays, and since we service a broad range of products and manufacturers, I see a lot of it and THAT is what kills the products more than anything else, to wit, component quality.

[Chuck H]

Well, I know I mentioned "child labor", but I was just trying to be extra derisive. I think the truth is that China or it's industries ability to produce good wares isn't the problem. Chinese industry can build a great amp. And they can do it cheaper for a number of reasons. The budget instrument market is the lynch pin in the quality of the goods. If an American amp company gets a bid from a Chinese maker and it can't be made competitive in the American market they either ask for a cheaper bid, accepting that this can mean thinner boards, chassis, traces, cheaper components, etc. And/or they get a bid from another maker that will use thinner boards, chassis, traces, cheaper components, etc. Example... Peavey has had much of their solid state work done in China for many years. I don't know if they've started this practice with their tube amps or not. But if you've ever looked inside a Bandit or old PA100 you'll notice very high build quality. Another example. I was on the inside for the design criteria of the Dean Markley CD60 re-issue. The guy in charge of the project looked inside the old JMF designed amps and thought they were atrocious. He spec'd heavier boards and dual traces, heavier chassis and better switches. These amps are made in China. If the contract company specs it, China will build it.

Now, there has been some questionable materials used in Chinese tubes and transformers. I don't know it this is changing or likely to but again, they're meeting a price point. So if an American company wants to use the cheaper tubes and transformers that's not the fault of the maker. They're providing the spec'd parts. I personally would not at this time use tubes or transformers from China but the day may come, or may have already, when China is using better metals and commanding a correspondingly higher price.

On a personal note I think it's a good practice to buy domestic. Not for any other reason than to support our own economy. God knows we haven't been able to build a car for twenty years. By the same token I think it's good practice for everyone in every country to buy domestic when applicable for the same reasons. This just doesn't work though. Without going into my views on what makes an amp "boutique" I'll just offer that there are small American builders of high quality amps that DO order pre assembled parts from overseas to their own quality specifications. Transformers are usually American and tubes are Russian of course. No one here needs a geography lesson on who makes the good transformers and tubes. Construction quality, customer service and choosing better components distinguish better amps (of course we all know where the good semi conductors come from too).

I'll close by noting that not long ago "made in Japan" was considered a mark of inferior quality. Ha. I've owned a Yamaha SBG, an Ibanez RG570 and a Japanese made Fender Stratocaster. All were fabulous, very high quality guitars. I drive a Ford but I understand Toyota makes a good car.

[Enzo]

Oh the car thing is emblematic here. Lansing Michigan is a big GM town. We still have several plants, though not quite as many as a couple decades ago. Town is chock full of UAW types. And the local paper gets streams of letters from them every time a Toyota recall is announced. Funny, they never write in when Cadillac recalls a quarter million CTSs because they might catch fire. The CTS is built here in town.

I looked into cars once. COmpared the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Honda Accord. That "American" PT Cruiser was built by what was then a German company (and now is an Italian company, Chrysler is), and was built in Mexico. It had about a 60% US content. The "Japanese" Honda Accord was built in MArysville, Ohio, and had an amazing 97% US content. Now whuch car was more American, the Chrysler or the Honda? I drive a Toyota pickup. It was built in California, not Japan.

I find it interesting to listen to the shifting rhetoric on the matter. We should "buy American." OK, are we trying to save jobs? Then Honda is producing more jobs than Chrysler in the above example, as is my Toyota factory. Then they say, "Yeah, but all that profit is going straight overseas..." What profit is that? GM was selling cars at a loss. At best Toyota had maybe 5% profit, and even assuming they invested none of that into the American operation, still wouldn;t we rather have 95% of something than 100% of nothing? And should all the people who sell, repair, market imports not have their jobs? If all imports were banned tomorrow, we surely would not find all of them employment at the remaining "American" companies. And what about that Chrysler situation? Owned by Fiat, they are an Italian company now. The UAW types of course won;t complain about their jobs at Chrysler, but all that profit...

[Enzo]

You know, I apologize. I don't want political stuff creeping up here into the technical section, and I regret letting myself do exactly that with the previous post.

Such matters may affect our industry, but I don;t want to get hauled down that road up here.