The impossible happens every day

[Mick Bailey]

So many external factors are involved that it's often not the equipment but some other item that's at fault, or contributes to the fault. The hardest thing for me is to second-guess a complex setup where I only have say an amp or FX unit that's been booked in, or where the fault would difficult to replicate in a workshop environment. To set up someone's entire stage rig and test end-to-end, or witness a fault with them playing live isn't something I want to do regularly, if at all. I draw parallels with someone taking their car into a garage and then expecting the mechanic to go on holiday with them so he/she is able to see the fault first-hand.

I consider the complexity of many setup to be beyond the reasonable contemplation of many musicians. I'm asked to program midi units, get calls to 'pick my brains' on how to assign channel switching patches on midi amps, and undertake many other duties that are user-oriented. The problems escalate where PCs or laptop connectivity is involved and then it can be a real headache to understand their particular setup, what they're doing, and what the expected behaviour should be. What's often missing is the end-user understanding of the individual components and how they interact. Instead of them reading the manual, they want me to do it and tell them in a simplified way how to get what they want.

Stuff is getting increasingly complicated. People now control FX units off their phones, have iPad mixers, do their own firmware upgrades on multi-fx units and load patches off the web. When these things go wrong it can be very time consuming to get to the bottom of the problem. If you don't have every component (including their phone) to hand, then it can be impossible. If you're not familiar with that piece of gear, then there's a lot of reading to do.

The desire to own equipment is always greater than the desire by the owner to understand how to operate it.

[nickb]

The desire to own equipment is always greater than the desire by the owner to understand how to operate it.

Classic!!

[nickb]

New part failures are more common than ever because so many difficult or expensive ICs and transistors are bought on eBay by techs who think they are getting a deal. Often it isn't and those $28 high power MOSFETS you got for $12 on eBay turn out to be remarked $2 MOSFETs. I got a "good deal" on a tray of ON Semi MJ15024 and MJ15025 and found out their were actually low power dies in a normal TO-3 case marked very convincing as the real thing. I seldom buy on eBay so it only happened to me once but I know shops which have been burned many times, the price is just too addicting to give up entirely.
Other than the forgeries, parts now are remarkably reliable as new to meet spec....except vacuum tubes which are worse than in the 50s and 60s.

Intermittent problems are the biggest time wasters for shops and most difficult to prove there is or is not a problem. Just by changing the policy in my shop when I was in California, of how units incoming were written up and verified as having a defect, resulted in about $4000 more /month in net profit. I instructed the girls at the counter to ask the owner to demonstrate the problem and set up a universal test cart with circuit breakers, variac, signal source etc. By watching the customer set up and use their unit, often they could spot user errors, particularly with keyboards and midi gear. If the customer could not duplicate it, by knowing exactly how he expected it to be set up, there was an excellent chance that there was no problem with the unit he brought in, might be elsewhere in the system. That was particularly true for anything related to home studios which has a lot of things in the signal path.
Often a user will say, "Check it out" as the only complaint when they are actually referring to a very specific set of routing or settings. This is really common with mixers. To completely test every combinations of possible routing can take a very long time, when what the customer really is complaining about "when channel 3 and 7 send pre-fader, Aux 3 is slightly lower than Aux 4". By eliminating ambiguous complaints or unverified intermittents from reaching the tech's benches, productivity increased dramatically. A unit on the bench with an unverified intermittent is the hardest hit on tech productivity there is because it takes a great deal of time to "prove" it works when it might not.

I never buy semi's off eBay unless there really is no other choice and then only from people I trust. In this case they came from a big UK distributor so my expectations were highest.

The idea of pre-screening is inordinately sensible and I do ask customers to demonstrate the problem. You certainly had the benefit of scale working in your favor.

[olddawg]

I had a friend ask me to look at his expensive 24 channel Carvin rack board the other day. He got it used from a friend that passed away. It's 4 or 5 years old. It has a weird problem where the frequency response for the whole board would randomly change independent of any EQ settings. A hard reset didn't resolve it. Since everything ran through one giant proprietary DSP IC, and we were in San Diego, I said to take it directly to Carvin....... They wouldn't even look at it. Would not even take it in. They said they would give him a discount on a new board. Sometimes you just have to punt.

[Drewline]

It is always so interesting to see the Factory Service Center unable to service their own products. We now more tha ever live in a disposable society. I had this problem last summer with a newer Roland Cube where it was sent to Roland since there was no service info on their website for it. They called with an estimate then called back a week later with a replacement estimate.

[Neal]

It's not just electronics. Back in the 70s, during the first gas crunch, everyone was trading in their V8s for 6 cylinder cars for better gas mileage. My father, a respected auto mechanic, worked with a guy who just unplugged 2 spark plug wires on his V8. He SWORE that he got better gas mileage, equivalent to a 6-cylinder engine.
I asked my father, "Wouldn't he get WORSE gas mileage? He's pumping 2 cylinder's worth of unburnt gas out his exhaust pipe!"
My father said, "Yep! But you can't tell HIM that."

[Chuck H]

I was a motor head in my teens. I don't care for working on cars so much now because it only comes up as a necessity but I'm a damn site better than the average shade tree grease monkey. Some of the stupid stuff I hear from those guys beg correction. I usually don't because along with the stereotype there's often a bit of Bubba in the mix. And I hate punching guys almost as much as being punched.

There's a lot of erroneous information available to amateurs of all types. Human nature dictates that, sans any actual understanding or education, we pick the info that suits us and hold it as fact. If I had to pick someone else to work on my car, I'd take a smart guy with a good sense of mechanics and decent troubleshooting skills, but little experience over most shade tree Bubba's that work on cars every day. Same for amp techs.

[Neal]

Completely off-topic, but my father learned mechanics and trouble-shooting in the Army Air Corps. He said they'd put all the trainees in a room with a mal-functioning aircraft engine on a stand. The instructor would tell them the symptoms of the motor, and give them a pad and pencil. They were expected to come up with 10 scenarios that would cause the engine to exhibit those symptoms, then circle the most likely cause. Once they passed THAT test, they were allowed to pick up a wrench.
I tell people I got Dad's 'taking-things-apart' gene, but somehow missed the 'putting-things-back-together' gene.

[John_H]

^^ Doesn't the RoHS compliant solder begin to break down after 4 or 5 years?

[Chuck H]

I tell people I got Dad's 'taking-things-apart' gene, but somehow missed the 'putting-things-back-together' gene.

Need two likes again!

[Chuck H]

^^ Doesn't the RoHS compliant solder begin to break down after 4 or 5 years?

I think the basis for that comes from early problems with "tin whiskers". Most RoHS compliant solder (Maybe all of it. I'm not sure.) will grow tin whiskers continuously like Chia Pets if not "conformally coated". I'm also not sure what amount of reliability is or longevity is added for this coating. But I know they do it now for most lead free boards.

[km6xz]

The service departments of most manufactures are funded from sales, which is the king in hierarchy of a product oriented company. So budgets are always tight and finding techs who will work for $12/hour means hiring without prior education or experience. If enough units of the same model flows over a bench a very high % of them will be repairs that were seen often so great diagnostic skills are not needed. They ARE a sales outfit so if a unit is difficult, selling a new unit to the owner comes as second nature. I took over the factory service for a big company which laid off its 25 tech shop and contracted me to handle the pallets of gear they sent everyday from their "factory" in southern California. We were pretty good on the units before since we had done 3-5 thousands of them each year for the prior 5 year but after getting ALL the units claimed under warranty, after warranty or rescuing a warranty station who just could not repair something. I can see why the companies have a low threshold in "Do Not Repair" level of complexity. Parts stock is the main reason, particularly with digital and cosmetic parts.....often they just don't exist anymore but only the "factory" knows what is not repairable in most cases, and independent shops only find out after they have invested hours then having a message of "NLA" on their parts order returned. A large parts stock is undesirable according to the "suits" in the sales and accounting offices, they hurt sales of new units and definitely cost more to stock, inventory, manage and second source so is one of the first divisions to feel the budget cuts. Service is the second line item that sees squeezed budgets.
Once a model goes out of production, many of the original parts become no longer available, particular custom logic ICs, pots and cosmetic, dress and trim items. Even if they are available, buying 100 for service inventory is very much higher than buying 50,000 for production. When shops complain that a part from the manufacturer is 2-3 times what is "should be", they forget when the factory service department buys, parts that are not currently being used in new production, they are buying at almost retail, plus the cost of stocking that part is much higher than when the same number of people were managing production supplies in the 50,000 quantity. The same basic resources in personnel and overhead are covered by those 100 parts as the 50,000. So what is the value of having that custom pot in stock for a parts department managing 100 quantity versus the warehouse managing pallets of 50,000?
The lack of diagnostic talent for non-typical repairs, the incentive pressure to sell new, and lack of parts availability conspire to make repairs of modern electronics less and less feasible. You can see the results, more retail sales of gear, but fewer shops that can or bother to handle it. Look as the shops that remain, mostly tube amp shops that only work on gear no longer supported by factories decades ago. There must be 100,000 such shops in the US, 1 or 2 people, all working on the same old inventory from 50s-80s gear and very few shops working on or capable of working on modern equipment with the training, education, parts stock, factory authorization, diagnostic skills etc and get paid 1/2-1/10 what some of the small one man highly inefficient amp shops charge. Many charge $300-400 for retubing and maybe changing a few capacitors, 1 hour, plus tubes at 30-100% markup. For a shop that is designed to be efficient on volume, a realistic price for that old amp would be $60. When we were doing thousands of ADATS back in the day of home recording on tape, we charged a flat rate, any repair $65 plus parts that had a 20% markup and made a ton of money on them because the shop was optimized for working on specific models in high volume. 1/2 our work was from other shops who were marking up our repairs $200 or more. That was OK because it kept the volume up so it could remain efficient. Amps are VERY simple devices and are mostly worked on by amateurs or semipros in their home workshops but with the low volume and inefficiencies of one man operations everything takes much longer to accomplish, particularly sourcing parts and diagnosis.
The service industry is disappearing for many reasons but it is not just because of being a throw-away society. As a consumer you have very little choice but to buy products that have little option to repair in the future. But the value and usefulness of a product that is SO cheap relative to decades in the past, it is better to replace than try to repair equipment if for no better reason the total cost of ownership is a lot lower. Back when everything was expected to be repairable, products were much more expensive relative to earnings of buyers. A 1960s Fender amp, say a Vibrasonic, if projected to post inflation dollars would be in the $3,848.80, a 24 track tape deck was about the same as a 3 bedroom house with 3000 feet swimming pool, a computer for handling accounting and inventory in 73 cost about $1200 a month to lease from IBM(System 32 plus page printer), plus leasing the operating system for another $1200/ month plus a full time programmer that was needed to create report runs for $1000/month. I know because that is what it cost me. Today for the same computing power, it would $50 in a cell phone. But I was paying the same hit as now would be $13,000 a month for a crude computer before visual displays or pre-compiled programs to generate reports. So, with labor at $6-9/hour, it was certainly worth getting things repaired and stocking parts for decades.
If there are more than a dozen MI general repair shops left in the US in 15 years I would be very surprised. There will always be one man YouTube Guru home workshops charging $1000 for magic tweaks of 50-60 year old items however. The manufacturers, consumers and repair shops are all conspiring to kill the last remaining repairable equipment.

[nickb]

I think the basis for that comes from early problems with "tin whiskers". Most RoHS compliant solder (Maybe all of it. I'm not sure.) will grow tin whiskers continuously like Chia Pets if not "conformally coated". I'm also not sure what amount of reliability is or longevity is added for this coating. But I know they do it now for most lead free boards.

And the laugh is, according to Maxim:

"The 2010 usage of lead, in all applications, was approximately 21 billion pounds. Of that, 16.8 billion pounds was consumed in batteries and only about 10.5 million pounds would have been consumed in IC lead finish if the RoHS directive were not in force for electronics. By the way, the lead in lead-acid batteries remains exempt from the RoHS directive."

No comment...

[Chuck H]

Stan, you're killing me! (seriously, I'm dead now )

All accurate as far as I know. Also, not really new information. But sometimes it's good to hear this stuff out loud anyway. I probably have a dozen adjuncts, additions or tweaks to add, but I digress in the interest of sanity. The basic plot is all there. And I too would be surprised if any general electronic repair shops exist in 2025. Hell, I'd even go 2020. Maybe it's time for the smart repair man to "guru up" Find a racket before the "S" hits the fan. That or retire to Russia.

[Chuck H]

And the laugh is, according to Maxim:

"The 2010 usage of lead, in all applications, was approximately 21 billion pounds. Of that, 16.8 billion pounds was consumed in batteries and only about 10.5 million pounds would have been consumed in IC lead finish if the RoHS directive were not in force for electronics. By the way, the lead in lead-acid batteries remains exempt from the RoHS directive."

No comment...

Yep. Isn't that a (f'in) hoot. I've heard and read a few things to support that info too. In 2009 I had to deal with RoHS compliance on a product re design for a business venture. That's when I learned something about what you just stated.

Let's see a show of hands from the guys that dispose of their batteries "correctly" instead of throwing them in the trash...

No one? Oh, ok. Never mind.