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[John Roberts {JR}]

Moby (Mike Diack) wrote on Mon, 14 February 2011 13:08

I have come to the conclusion that the trick with Crown is to never buy anything in the first 2 years on the market - give them time to iron out the bugs on other guineapigs/customers/betatesters, issue the ECOs and get it right. I realise Crown has a huge amount of embedded customer loyalty in the USA (probably built up by the MA series bricks) and because the service turnaround is short and sweet, believers are prepared tolerate teething problems, but in other parts of the world, where shipping costs real money, the shine comes off real quick when a new whizzy amp like the i-Tech has close to a 100% failure rate (I know this because I'm the bloke who had to fix them)in the initial issue. This is NOT a small sample in my part of the world. M

Your experience, while biased toward over exposure to failures is surely more relevant to a discussion of reliability.

While a minor distinction, design faults are only a reliability issue when left uncorrected.

Do you service all brands? I seem to recall from past discussions that you service enough of them to make a general comparison.

I have been involved in major amp roll-outs before and it requires a large amount of time, effort, and luck to dodge the gremlins that can bite you (I have bite marks in my tender places).

The crown I-Tech problems were well reported and we can debate the difficulty of shutting down for weeks or months to re-engineer a problem assembly after the production lines have been turned on full.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I'm old enough to recall the general advice to never buy a new car in the first months of production.  Probably still true today.

JR

[jeff harrell]

Greg Cameron wrote on Mon, 14 February 2011 09:19

Tim McCulloch wrote on Mon, 10 January 2011 08:09 Our old iron Crest 8001s, however, have been the most reliable amps we've owned.  To say we have dozens of each would be accurate. Couldn't agree more. I have a love hate relationship with my 8001s. I love them because they're super reliable and seem to produce more burst power than the specs would indicate. IOW, they seem to have more punch than other similarly power rated amps for low frequency duty. I hate them because they're 80 lbs. each. At least now they have a home where they don't have to be moved Greg

yeah , and the QSC 3800 weighs 75 pounds. oooohhhhhhh my back ! carry it on your shoulder or gitta rack ! i need the back rack now !

[John Watson]

I just got rid of a QSC RMX 2450, that once out of warranty wouldn't stay working for more than two months at a time.

You can always get a lemon with any amp. My best experience has been with AB Internationals (remember them?) and Crest. I also had some Macro's which held up fine. But for some reason QSC's have always been problematic for me.

[MARK PAVLETICH]

In my experience of using power amps over the last 40 years, two brands stand head and shoulders above the rest for reliability. QSC and Peavey. Yes I have had both of these fail ocasionally but not very often, and when they did they were fixable by local techs. I had a good run out of the non lightweight Carver PM series as well, real tough workhorses.

The one thing I must say about the Peaveys is that the only reliable ones were the heavy ones........Being an earlier adopter of Lightweight amps in the 90's Peavey paid the price for a less than mature technology. I have never used the modern Chinese made Peaveys so I cannot comment.

QSC's have been reliable, both the heavy and the lightweight ones, both US and Chinese made. I also must note that QSC's and Peaveys have both also given me a lower rate of speaker failures over the years so I guess I have a winner,,,,QSC !!

[Glen Kuykendall]

I had a bunch of Crown amps back in the 80s-90s, but when I recently built a new small club system I went with QSCs and have been very pleased with them. For tops I run a pair of EV SX300s off a PLX1804, and just recently started using just one side of that amp for a monitor mix and both the EVs on the other channel. I run a 2nd PLX1804 for two more monitor mixes. Then I run my pair of Danley TH-Minis in parallel on one bridge PLX2502. So far with about 10 gigs on the system all has been well and sounding great. For HPF filters, EQ, limiters and such I started off with a DR260, but moved to a Xilica XP-4080 unit (w/ethernet) as I could run my mains, plus 3 monitor mixes off of one unit. With a cheap wireless router velcroed into my amp rack hooked to the Xilica, I can tweak all the PA processor settings via wireless using my cheap little HP Netbook.

[Tim McCulloch]

thomas jones wrote on Mon, 14 February 2011 08:00

Am I hallucinating or are there alot of Crown failures? Maybe it's the odds because there are so many and the ones that fail are a small % of the number in use. I know everybody hates the B word but I have 2 EP2500's and an EPX 3000 and they work first time every time and I always get compliments on the sound from 2 old SR4735's & 2 SR4718's. I spend the extra money on hallucinogens.

The Crown I-Tech failures (the spectacular ones, anyway) stopped 4 years ago.  There are occasional minor issues, but that's true for every make and model we own.  Out of around 50 I-Techs, we've sent 3 to Crown for a "funny noise", not a Flame Linear moment.  We have had no spectacular failures, ever.  We also had to have 1 MacroTech 3600 (out of 24 Old Iron MTs, now replaced with ITechs) serviced a couple years ago.  Overall, we're very happy with the reliability of Crown, Crest (at least the old stuff) and QSC (although we have only a couple QSC amps).  All of "the majors" make good stuff.

FWIW, we also had to repair 3 Crests in the last 2 years, but most of them are close to 20 years old.  Realize we own 100+ amps that vary in age from a few months to older than some of the posters here.

I've been a weekend warrior, too, schlepping gear in a van and was always worried about a failure because I either had no space or no money for spares.  That was 25 years ago, though, when a "big" amp was 400w/ch @ 4 ohms and weighed at least 60#.  Today there are many choices that weigh less, are smaller and more affordable than ever.  At today's prices a weekend warrior would be foolish to not have some kind of back up amp.  Sound Image carries spare I-Techs... exactly *2* for an arena sized rig, one for monitors and one for PA.

Have fun, good luck.

Tim Mc