Hi Danny

It has been a dogs age since I've been inside a mixer or amplifier. But I used to repair em long long ago. Maybe Mac has been inside some of the newer stuff.

Unless the method of construction has changed a lot recently, it ought to be feasible to get it repaired cheaper than buying a new one.

A long time ago my typical price for a blown power amp was around $100 sometimes higher, just depending on what was wrong. Dunno if repair has drastically inflated nowadays. In the old days you could expect to replace at least one of the small components, and typically expect to replace several power transistors, though you never can tell. Sometimes all you have to do is re-melt a bad solder connection that took a few years of wiggling around to finally go bad.

But even if it is just a bad solder joint, the repair guy has to take the gadget apart and find/fix the joint, test, reassemble, test again. So unless the repairman is deadly efficient (as some fellers can be), it will probably be on the bench for at least an hour even for the simple repair.

Some shops back then would buy matched pairs of transistors that can be pretty expensive, and then do retail markup on the parts, so the parts could be pretty dern expensive if you replace 4 or 8 power transistors. But you can't really blame the shop too much. Even though the prices might seem high, I never know many audio repairmen that lived in mansions and drove cadillacs <g>.

I'd buy big bags of good quality transistors way back when (cheaper than matched devices) and sit down with the curve tracer and make my own matched sets. Which didn't take a lot of my time and save some money for everybody. But if a repairman is busy enough, such practice might seem a waste of time.

James Chandler Jr
http://www.errnum.com/