|
BGA is not a problem for us, after all, most of our gear is vintage and the most you will find that is hard/impossible to fix is the 'printed' resistors that kenwood used in the 1970's or the sanken darlington packs that are unobtania, along with some wierd FETs, strange pallet output transistors and particularly oddball value large power supply caps. BGA is the provence of modern gear and it has no place in real hifi. As an example, when Sony ES went from all through hole to a mix of surface and through hole- the quality was gone. You can't put surface mount componentry in a power amp driver stage and not expect the things to blow up like fireworks. I know a certain 5 channel 25kg gold power amp from Sony that appears on eBay all the time where the driver transistors are tiny crumb sized surface mounts- what a joke. All this BS about shorter signal paths etc etc for a preamp, poweramp and reliability is complete rubbish. We all know through hole has the runs on the board in high current hifi applications. My policy is to not have any real hifi with surface mount in it. My CD players cross the line a little due to the odd surface mount IC, but basically after 1990/1 they all turned to crap in terms of construction. You can't have a dvd player without surface mount somewhere, but that's life i guess, no one uses one for serious hifi anyway.
The following rules will help you sort out real hifi from junk:
The output transistors are discrete and the more the better.
The power supply caps have a recognized brand on them and the larger value the better. (no flying pigeon brand or sun-moon brand etc etc)
The power amp stage has no ICs in the signal path.
The amp is heavy and solid.
It has a speaker A+B switch where they can run in parallel.
It has two phono inputs or a MM/MC input.
An integrated amp without a phono input is modern JUNK.
A tuner should weigh more than a bottle of milk.
The more heads and motors in a cassette deck, the better it is.
And my personal favourite which I apply to CD players. If you can't lift the machine up by the the CD drawer- it IS a piece of junk. (that means as a minimum, lift the machine off the shelf by the end of the drawer up to at least 45 degrees). The old machines can do it easily. A CDP101 can be held by the drawer. Early philips/marantzs can, as can most of the sony ES line, some denons and pioneers and others. I dare you to try it with some of these 'audiophile' machines that are held together with plastic clips- haha.
Anyway, enough ranting...
john
|