Anyone else walking away from repairs?

[Randall]

I am at a point in my life when wisdom may actually be taking over. I find myself telling customers who bring me gear that just looks like it's going to be quicksand, because either it's so abused or damaged, or so not made to be repaired, that I will have to pass. I have become more selective in what I take in, and I tell the ones with the bottom end China Fenders or whatever that with this amp, repair was not a consideration when it was designed and manufactured. Especially the SMD stuff. Cheaper and cheaper insides, no disconnects, total tear down to replace a tube socket, etc. A big SS power amp or bass amp with traces burnt and corrosion everywhere.... I just don't want to go there any longer.

Give me an old Fender or marshall or whatever, sure. But this new disposable stuff... I am getting OK with just saying NO. The response is usually, "well, it was cheap". And there you go.

I won't even accept a Behringer or Line 6 or any of that crap, because I know it's probably going to be whole board replacement, and anyway, they won't even sell me one, and then it might not even be the solution. Saw that at the last factory authorized place I worked at. Then, you've bought a board that didn't fix it, for a cheap assed amp that you aren't getting paid for probably. No thanks. Saw too much of that from factory support.

So, is it just me, or is the world now disposable?

[Britt Rossman]

I wouldn't worry about it...

I've heard of a local business in my town practicing the same thing. There is a difference between an old point-to-point (where a glance at the guts can tell you how it works) and the new stuff like Line 6's (which IME are PC's with a speaker attached... so many processors etc...).

Frankly, I have begun to tell folks that myself cuz I'm just too busy with other things to fix anything that ain't simple. I'll help folks debug if it'll take 10 minutes, but I'm not an EE or certified tech, just some idiot with a multimeter!

[Enzo]

Not disposable, just beyond your skill. I don't mean that harshly, there are amps beyond my skills too. If you are used to using a solder gun and wiring pots and sockets on an old Fender chassis, then surface mount parts are a challenge. But to a tech who works on SM every day, it is business as usual.

I regret you telling customers their amps were not designed to be repaired. They were not designed to be repaired by old technology. I admit, I never invested in up to date modern sm equipment. the limited work I did on sm - changing an op amp or a diode - I could do with a hand iron. few hundred dollars and I could have been up to date, but I was getting out of the game anyway, so no... I never saw the benefit telling customers they made a poor purchase decision. Good or bad, it is THEIR amp, it is what they use. Like telling a guy his wife is not attractive, what possible good comes from that?


I used to be a Behringer service center. We didn't replace many boards at all, we fixed stuff. If a repair was going to be too involved, they preferred to replace the unit for the customer. Not a stack of board swaps. A 100 leg IC is a pain in the ass to change by hand, not nearly so bad with a hot air system. But all those 8 and 14 leg ICs, I can change them with my iron. If someone buys a new board to find out if that is the problem or not, then they have not done a complete troubleshooting job.

If you don't feel you can do a good job at a reasonable rate, then by all means tell the customer that your shop is not the place for this repair. And what really helps them is having a place to refer them to. Some OEMs do repair work, like Peavey. Some have regional repair centers to back up the locals. I recall Korg not having us send things to them, but instead to one of several regionals, if we couldn't conquer something.

[dchang0]

I'm the same way with my day job as a computer consultant. Got a bad malware infection on a PC older than 3 years? Better to buy a new one than purge the infection. You get a newer OS with better security and all the hardware is fresh (faster and more energy efficient, and mechanical parts are unworn). The old PC goes to China where it is recycled to make new stuff (except that shipping between the US and China has slowed dramatically, so these dumped PCs may end up in landfills instead). I am seeing a whole bunch of new PCs that fail within the first 30 days thanks to excessive cost-cutting due to razor-thin margins in the PC business as people dump desktops for smartphones (and now the smartphone business is stalling--see Apple's stock drop).

Economies of scale, miniaturization, and planned obsolescence have made it easier to throw stuff away than repair it. If you buy a Microsoft Surface 3 and break the screen, it is cheaper to buy a new one than to send it to a service center to replace the screen thanks to the construction methods. We consumers made it that way, by demanding no air-gap between the glass and LCD and ultra-thin designs that require glue instead of screws for assembly.

I will occasionally do repairs on things that require "whole board replacements" like TVs, stereos, modern guitar amps, etc., but only for friends where I know they won't get mad if I fail to figure it out. Usually it is not a matter of failing to diagnose the problem--it is a matter of failing to find a replacement part(s) or method that is cost-effective. For instance, a friend's Samsung smart TV had its WiFi circuit burn out. Samsung wanted $1400 for the repair, which is less than many newer TVs cost on sale during the holidays. The WiFi circuit is on the mainboard and cannot be replaced without changing out the whole mainboard, and used mainboards from salvage shops are $400 (about the cost of a 40" TV nowadays, not on sale). Our workaround? Give up on the internal WiFi and use an external WiFi dongle or Ethernet cable ($10). We are effectively not going to repair the TV but just band-aid it.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Give me an old Fender or marshall or whatever, sure. But this new disposable stuff... I am getting OK with just saying NO.

I mentioned a couple days ago so I'll do it again: about 20 years back, up the coast a ways from you Doug Hoffman was making PTP turret boards - that's how I met him. Other than that his shingle read "Practice Limited to Point to Point Fenders and Marshalls ONLY." Although I'm sure he could fix the occasional old Ampeg, Gibson, etc. he stuck to what he knew well & apparently was doing all right for himself. Jump ahead 20 years, Doug's now in North Carolina (better weather, more centralized shipping) and does a heroic job selling quality parts, making amps & running his website with its incredible collection of schematics.

Just a couple hours ago I turned down a Behringer mix/amp with a defective amp assign switch. I figured it would be a hair pulling, time wasting, hardly worth doing fix. Besides the unit has plenty of patch points, and the amp assignment could easily be done with a cable instead of switch. Done. No worries, its owner's going to bring me a Twin Reverb with a simple problem I can fix in fifteen minutes. Better that than hassling any Behringer.

Work on what you're comfortable with. I'm sure you developed a good customer base & excellent rep in Ft. Myers area. You're under no obligation to waste your time. Now if I could only follow my own advice...

[Usable Thought]

We consumers made it that way, by demanding no air-gap between the glass and LCD and ultra-thin designs that require glue instead of screws for assembly.

More accurate to say the manufacturers did market research, found "small/thin" was something consumers liked, then began pushing it on us & we bought it not knowing the consequences that you describe. The consumer is in the driver's seat, in theory, but only in this very strange, ass-backward way. Everyone has blindfolds on.

Also as far as the discussion and dislike of Behringer - I have read some interesting articles (not related to guitars specifically) that they were one of the first companies to start making less expensive audio devices that had many high-end features. I don't know if that is still their marketing strategy, but it seems like it. Their stuff seems still very popular for more or less this reason (I have a couple of their devices myself); and so to condemn their manufacturing methods would seem to misunderstand the intentions of both why the stuff is made as it is & why people buy it. Low initial price with good features may have more meaning than "can it be fixed the old fashioned way."

Same with SM - as a consumer I'm not happy with all the SM components on my little Laney tube amp; they make modding much harder and I am dubious about their durability & also the durability of a PCB installed so cheaply that it flexes each time you swap preamp tubes. But I couldn't have bought an old-style point-to-point build for as little money as I bought the Laney with. I didn't know at the time what I was getting into, but I can't entirely blame Laney - they are trying to reach a mass market. If SM-averse techs were given the power to rule the world, then I wouldn't have been able to afford a new amp at that price. Whether that would be a good or a bad thing, we'll never know. Maybe fewer features, but easier-to-fix failures?

[teemuk]

I've seen a few trend towards disposability: Development is often so fast that things don't even have to reach the end of their life and they are already obsoleted. Buy a computer, the electronics inside as is could last 50 years, yet development makes the thing outdated in a year or two. In five years you're probably ran out of software / hardware support and the thing is so old its practically obsolete. Same applies to many other appliances as well, cellphones, TVs...

Some are naturally built to a price point. Your average TV costs only few hundred euros. You think there's enough profit margin in that to design in extreme reliability and serviceability? If the service costs are already about half of that of an entirely new unit how many will find it sensible? How sensible is to design for easy service in such case?

All that adds to the costs too. And when the average person gets to choose between two seemingly "identical" amps (from specs point of view), one that costs $4000, and another that costs $400, which one you think he chooses? We advance disposability largely by our very own actions. When we buy things like amps, we don't even dream of investing equal amounts of money to them as we invest in stuff from which we expect long-term reliability, coupled to easy and moderately inexpensive service. Amps are cheap. Yes, even the "boutique" ones. And cheap stuff is often disposable because other options would not make much sense.

Besides, how much of trendy "bombproof" methods to build amps really are that.... instead of aesthetic luring of customers. You think it's easier to repair rat's nest PTP with blobs of components soldered together, no silkscreen and component designations, overuse of heatshrink, multiple leads wrapped around turrets
and soldered together, etc. If things were layed out with thought a repair of ordinary PCB amp could be breeze in comparison. But they look less "sexy" to an ordinary potential customer and you can't sell the stuff to same price point.

Also as far as the discussion and dislike of Behringer - I have read some interesting articles (not related to guitars specifically) that they were one of the first companies to start making less expensive audio devices that had many high-end features.

Behringer follows the same recipe that has worked throughout the history: Copy a product that has proven to be commercially very successfull, but build your own version to a cheaper price point. This has worked marvellously for all kinds of industries throughout our known history (it's called competition you know). Behringer first one? In your dreams. Just look at history of Marshall or Fender for example. Similarly they saw a potential market, and a way to cut share of it by copying someone else's successfull product (to some extent) and selling it at cheaper price than their competitors. Behringer is doing nothing unique. They just do their thing more apparently than some others and for some reason happen to be a pet peeve of a lot of people. Yet when a "boutique" company uses same tactique the crowd responses differently.... because of values associated to little "boutiques" vs. multinational organizations thriving on cheap labour (or something) ...Humanity at its finest.

[Mick Bailey]

When I got into computers in the 70s I used to do component-level repair of everything - that was the culture back then in my industry. When the first desktop computers arrived it was a bit of a shock compared to the Digital and Prime stuff I was used to, but pretty soon those desktop machines were being repaired at component level. It didn't take long before Taiwanese manufacturing was turning out boards where our trade buy-in price was less than the burdened cost of an hour's labour. So the only real thing left was monitor and peripheral repair.

If you look at the way most consumer electronics has gone, it's pretty much all about lowering manufacturing costs. If you take the standard multiplier of 5x or 6x manufacturing to retail escalation, then (say) a Zoom multi-effects processor retailing at £70 is being made for £14 or less. The thing that makes them so cheap is lack of human involvement and massive scale of production. I jokingly said to a customer after doing a repair on a Zoom that he was possibly the first human ever to touch that unit when he opened the box.

I don't believe there's a sinister plan to render such products obsolete; if that Zoom or whatever breaks and you have access to 'inside' prices, what economic model could make it more worthwhile to fix a faulty PCB compared to replacing it, or even the entire unit?

Repairing many items becomes difficult because of lack of familiarity, lack of engineering information, and no access to diagnostic software. Some equipment has internal headers to run diagnostics or perform firmware upgrades. Try working on a car without being able to read error codes. You could rig up a scope and poke around with your DMM for a couple of hours or plug in a a laptop, recall 'missed camshaft sensor pulse' and go straight to the problem in minutes.

A schematic is the same regardless of whether it's SMD or through-hole technology, but it's not so easy to 'read' an SMD board - even identifying a component can be tricky. A burnout with damaged tracks is much more difficult to put right. Once the techniques for component replacement have been acquired, then I find there's no problem in replacing most SMD components. The deal-breaker for me is those large BGA packages such as Sansamp chips.

I now turn down more jobs than before, not because of SMD, but because of the time element with some equipment is way too much of an overhead. I do a quick calculation - what's the replacement cost of the item, what are my chances of swiftly diagnosing what's wrong, what are the chances of fixing it, what are the chances of getting parts, what are the chances of it failing again?

To get a real idea of how cheaply and how complex consumer gear can be, and how uneconomic it is to repair, try this: Dismantle a digital camera, diagnose what's wrong, find and order parts, fix it, put it back together, test every function and guarantee it for three months. Then try to come up with a viable price when you find out it costs £80 brand-new and you've spent three hours on it.

[Enzo]

I agree, there is no "planned obsolescence", there is just the market. When I bring out a new improved something two years after the last one, it isn't to make the last one obsolete, it is to get you to buy a new one.

If you are a rock band, do you play the same set list forever? or do you learn new songs as they become popular?

I know guys who only work on eyelet board Fenders, we call them skimmers. They skim the easy stuff off the top, leaving more arcane stuff for the real techs.

[mhuss]

Anything electronic that is designed and built these days is meant to be disposable, and is made just reliable enough that warranty repairs won't eat into profits. That sounds cynical, but it's just the truth.

I'm on board with the OP, I do repairs as an interesting side job, so I'll pick ones that are not going to make me mad or lose money. I agree with Enzo, don't insult the unit, even if it is a cheap piece of crap, just say "it'll cost $$$ to fix (convert currency as appropriate), might as well just get a new one" to discourage them from getting it repaired.

Aside: This is what keeps me from spending 1500-4500USD on a Fractal or Kemper, etc. Even though those things fascinate me, they will be obsolete just as quickly (or perhaps more so) as my laptop. My old tube amps will keep running and be just as useful for as long as I can still get tubes for them.

[olddawg]

Not disposable, just beyond your skill. I don't mean that harshly, there are amps beyond my skills too. If you are used to using a solder gun and wiring pots and sockets on an old Fender chassis, then surface mount parts are a challenge. But to a tech who works on SM every day, it is business as usual.

I regret you telling customers their amps were not designed to be repaired. They were not designed to be repaired by old technology. I admit, I never invested in up to date modern sm equipment. the limited work I did on sm - changing an op amp or a diode - I could do with a hand iron. few hundred dollars and I could have been up to date, but I was getting out of the game anyway, so no... I never saw the benefit telling customers they made a poor purchase decision. Good or bad, it is THEIR amp, it is what they use. Like telling a guy his wife is not attractive, what possible good comes from that?


I used to be a Behringer service center. We didn't replace many boards at all, we fixed stuff. If a repair was going to be too involved, they preferred to replace the unit for the customer. Not a stack of board swaps. A 100 leg IC is a pain in the ass to change by hand, not nearly so bad with a hot air system. But all those 8 and 14 leg ICs, I can change them with my iron. If someone buys a new board to find out if that is the problem or not, then they have not done a complete troubleshooting job.

If you don't feel you can do a good job at a reasonable rate, then by all means tell the customer that your shop is not the place for this repair. And what really helps them is having a place to refer them to. Some OEMs do repair work, like Peavey. Some have regional repair centers to back up the locals. I recall Korg not having us send things to them, but instead to one of several regionals, if we couldn't conquer something.

I agree completely. I spent most of my time on the bench repairing consumer and professional audio/video equipment. I had everything but an oven for the multilayer ball solder technology and even had ways of getting around that. 10 years ago just about EVERYTHING was surface mount components with SMPS and regularly had to replace 250 pin surface mount uprocessors glued to the boards. Board replacement was rarely done because of production run revisions. I got a lot of stuff that was deemed "not economically repairable" by other shops. The customer would call the manufacturer and bitch and then it would be sent to me sometimes as a warranty repair even if it was years out of warranty. Usually it was just a bad smd cap or something simple if the previous shop didn't damage something. A lot of shops "cherry picked" repairs. Especially during the VCR era before SMD. They just didn't get warranty status. If you have a profitable nitch that allows you to do that that's fine. I do that now repairing stuff out of my house. If it is beyond my ability or I just don't want to be bothered, I don't do it. But I agree with Enzo. Be up front with the customer. Telling the customer "I don't fix those" is quite different from "it's a cheap, poorly made piece of junk and nobody can fix it". I had a friend bring me a Line 6 instrument wireless though a while back out of warranty. I told him to call the manufacturer and tell them he was a poor starving musician and it should not have failed. They simply replaced it free of charge.

[Mick Bailey]

Anything electronic that is designed and built these days is meant to be disposable, and is made just reliable enough that warranty repairs won't eat into profits. That sounds cynical, but it's just the truth.

Would a manufacturer go to lengths to design-in unreliability, especially just to last the warranty period? That seems a tall order. The problem I see is the churn-rate of technology and the constant reinvention of a product. How long does a customer/consumer want to run a product for before they feel it to be obsolete? I would argue that some of the early generation of mobile phones are much better built than new ones, or a Ford model T is easier to service and fix than a new Honda. If we look at 1st generation products they're often obsolete, but built much better than later stuff. We don't watch tube TVs, yet they lasted longer than modern ones probably will. Those early IBM XTs were built to last decades and had a thick steel casing, but no-one wanted one once the next generation came out.

Sadly, I don't actually think that people in general want stuff to last - they want the latest version and technology moves so fast as to quickly render the old one obsolete.

[gui_tarzan]

I have an original IBM XT somewhere here in the house. I haven't fired it up in over twenty years but one of these days I will just to see if it still works. The thing about them was you could turn it on, then go brew a cup of coffee the old fashioned way, come back and it might be at a prompt. You never got a blue screen though.

[Enzo]

People like to say things like they design then just to last until the warranty ends, but really. How about all those 30 year old peavey solid state amps, still cranking out, and STILL SUPPORTED.

[g1]

There are exceptions, and there are rules . And I think we know which one Peavey is.
Manufacturers know exactly what their % of warranty claims is. If it's too high, they try to improve reliability. If it's real good, they know they can maybe cut some component costs. The bean counters usually prevail.