Worshiping Tin-Lead and other Old Bits of Junk Technology

The following is a letter I sent to TapeOp Magazine regarding a silly end rant by John Baccigaluppi about how much he loves tin-lead solder and big iron audio electronic equipment. A year ago, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photography tour and I have stuck a video of that

While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure.

Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.

Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.

Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.