[Mike Rivers]

Arny Krueger wrote:

I did a little checking around and failed to find even one pro audio shop
that wanted $500 to do an inspection of a $500 mixer.

There's lots of things you can't find on the Internet. Who
would even ask such a question? A shop would probably quote
something like $75 (minimum shop rate) to take a look and
give an estimate for repair. I doubt that anyone who got a
quote of more than $200 would leave it for repair, but
rather, would sell it on eBay ("worked fine last year") and
buy a new and probaby better mixer for a little more than
the cost of repair.

Just the other day, I heard from someone who got a quote
from a shop with a good reputation of $200 minimum for
repairing his Mackie hard disk recorder, and that was
without even looking at it. And an HDR24/96 is a whole lot
easier to work on than, say, a Mackie VLZ series mixer.

I've taken a few of them apart myself, and it isn't rocket science. I could
see where someone who didn't want to deal with that class of customer or
product might intentionally price themselves out of the particular
marketplace, but that's an administrative choice, not a technical necessity.

But it's still a problem - if you don't tackle the job
yourself, you either pay the price or walk away. Still,
$85/hour is not an unreasonable rate these days. Given that
to get to certain components in many inexpensive one-board
mixers it's necessary to take the whole thing apart, just
getting to both sides of the circuit board and putting it
back together again can easily take an hour if you know
where all the hidden screws and nuts are. And then if you
need to do any troubleshooting, you have to cobble up a way
to power it up and connect signals to it. If everything
connects to the board with ribbon cables, either you have to
prop things up so you can plug in the cables dangling from
the chassis or you need a test fixture. That's something
that a shop that does a lot of work on a particular product
line might have built, but they have to pay for that labor
out of repairs to that product. Honestly, other than
replacing a fuse, I can't see any repair on a "non-fixable"
mixer costing less than about $150.

Paul, since your literacy module seems to have gone missing, I'll spell it
out for you - the author of the $500 number is not me but rather is one Mike
Rivers, the date was 5/30/2010 and the time was 11:29 PM EDT. In short
Paul, you owe me a public apology. I'm not holding my breath!

Don't get me and my feeble memory into the middle of this.
Get the magazine and read the article yourself.

So here we see a repeat of the urban myth that SMT parts are totally
non-replacable. Paul, can't you do better than that? Many of us know better!

Surface mounted parts are certainly replaceable. Capacitors
and resistors are pretty easy to replace if you can find
them, identify them, and purchase the replacement part. A
sample kit from ChipQuik and a low wattage soldering iron
with a small tip will handle the job, and most people who
have a reasonable amount of repair experience can do it the
first time without causing any further damage. Replacing
ICs with close to 100 connections is a little more
difficult, however, and takes skill, experience, and in many
cases, special equipment.
A shop that fixes hard-wired guitar amplifiers isn't
equipped to do that.

I've got a pair of ADA 8000s that are now over 4 years old and are used
several times a week. If memory serves, 8 pots per box. Not a noisy pot in
the lot. This would be 8 mic preamps per box with an average street price of
$240 or about $30 each...

I've had a Soundcraft 600 console for nearly 25 years.
Nearly every pot, switch, and fader is noisy. It cost $7600
and has 24 mic input channels. Those are $316.67 preamps
(inflate that money if you dare). There's no way I'm going
to replace as many parts as needed to make it like new
again. A 16-channel Mackie Onyx costs about as much as four
channels, and sounds better.


--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson