Overrating Repairability

Back in the mid-80’s I thought I had a small vision of the future. I imagined that there would be a much larger market for small, high fidelity, high reliability power amplifiers for the home studio market. First, I talked Pat Quilter into designing a one-rack-space Series One amplifier for that market; the QSC 1080/1100. From my own studio experience, I added a pair of headphone jacks for control room monitoring, with independent and easily replaceable limiting resistors so that two different monitor headphones could be plugged into that amp with the expectation that the acoustic output would be the same on both phones regardless of sensitivity or impedance. My contribution to the company’s documentation was the schematics that were found at the back of every owners’ manual for more than a decade. I also spec’d all of our circuit boards at 2 mil thickness to make servicing easier without causing damage to our boards during repair and to add to the durability of our products. I even argued that slotted screws were more repair-friendly than Philips screws, due to my experience working on Japanese motorcycles. (I was wrong in that argument.) 40 years ago, I was a big believer in designing field-repairable products. Today, not so much.

I have a long career in music instrument (MI) and audio equipment repair. That means, I have worked on equipment from the end of the tube design period through the 30-some years of analog equipment and discrete-to-integrated-circuit designs to today’s surface mount technology (SMT) components and our current age of equipment that is so complicated it is very nearly unrepairable for anyone but factory technicians. I have worked for several manufacturers, either as a captured employee repairing company products or as an independent tech working as an authorized service center or repairing equipment long past warranty. I’ve worked on a lot of equipment after someone else has attempted to make repairs. I’ve seen butchered single-sided printed circuit boards (PCBs), slaughtered double-sided PCBs with nonsensical jumpers scattered all over the board to bypass the wreaked traces, and point-to-point terminal strips so buried in cold solder that I needed a bottle of flux to get the solder to flow well enough to remove past repair attempts. And those messes were often created by factory authorized service center technicians and even the factory technicians! There are at least two well-known, high end Eurotrash console makers (who may or may not remain nameless) that were infamous for shipping new consoles with so many butchered and jumpered boards and wiring harnesses that we just assumed their crap would need reworking out of the crate. All of that equipment was repairable, but it needed repairing on a constant basis; rarely less than every 100 hours of use.

In fact, most of the products from our past that are “repairable” were made that way because their expected lifetime was incredibly short without occasional repairs. The old VW air-cooled motors lasted about 35,000 to 50,000 miles between major overhaul (35 for the van, 50 for the Beatle). In the good old days, an analog tape deck required recalibration with every new reel of tape and serious and expensive maintenance every two thousand hours (about 250 8-hour-days) of operation. In modern vehicles, safety features like crumple zones, air bags, ABS brakes, and other electronic-controlled features and functions limit repairability to module replacement because of their complexity and design. It’s not just the SMT components, but the incredible increase in complexity of the circuit designs that limits field repairs.

However, we’re at a point in auto manufacturing history where any vehicle that doesn’t last 200,000 miles between major service intervals is considered a lemon. Other products offer similar longevity expectations. I’m still using a 2008 Dell laptop, although it is on its 3rd keyboard (which was designed to be easily replaceable). While Millennials seem to think a cell phone is obsolete after a year or less, my flip phone has been working just fine for the last decade and it is still on the original battery. Televisions usually get replaced becauses they are “too small” or don’t have current features, not because the CRT or other tubes and components have failed. Appliances are often handed down to a home’s next owners because, on average, Americans stay in their houses fewer years than an appliance survives.

Much of what we buy today can be repaired, it just costs so little to replace it that we do that instead. Click and Clack, the guys on the old Car Talk NPR radio show once estimated that it cost an average of $600/year to maintain an old car, far less than car payments. People still buy new cars, even when their current vehicle is probably good for another decade or two. My father, on the other hand, habitually traded in his “old” Chevy at 50,000 miles because he was used to his cars falling apart about then; and losing trade-in “value.” My first decent vehicle, a 1973 Toyota Hilux pickup, lasted for 350,000 miles with a valve job at 250,000 and a rear transmission seal at 275,000 being the only significant necessary repairs. I sold it for almost exactly what I paid for it, thirty years later. Now that is both longevity and repairability, but no crumple zones, no ABS, decent fuel economy but lousy emissions, lots of vehicle noise, and not much interior comfort. My current 2008 Nissan pickup has most of the creature comforts and safety features of the best car; at least as of 2008. It is pretty servicable, too. My brother’s new Toyota coupe looks like a nightmare to service, but it has a 100,000 mile power train warranty.

Finally, while there is lots of talk about fighting the disposable product economy, there isn’t much energy going into actually doing it. Consumers are quite happy being ignorant about how practically everything they own works. I would bet that the percentage of consumers (including musicians and studio owners) who are capable of repairing even the most simple electro-mechanical problem is less than 1% and many of those would rather they didn’t need to. At some point in manufacturing history, someone asked “How many customers read our detailed owner’s manual with maintenance and service information?” When the answer came back, it was obvious that was a waste of time and effort. Soon after, someone asked, “How many customers care if a service manual is available?” That discouraging answer eliminated service manuals. As long as those kinds of questions keep getting money-saving answers, you can assume servicability will continue to vanish.

If you really like working on old junk, there is more than enough of that crap availble out there for you to play with. Since all of the post-Boomer generations appear to be mostly bdisinterested in “vintage” crap, prices are falling and demand is vanishing. At that rate, you should be able to buy Grandpa’s muscle car for less than your father paid for it. Hurry, though. Old stuff is showing up in the dump on an accelorated schedule. Turns out, most people would rather recycle old equipment rather than wrestle with fixing it.

The other end of the decision process is function, value, and price. For the cost of a 24-track record head you can buy 24-or-more high definition preamps with a high-resolution A/D interface that will likely last for a decade or more with no maintenance required. For the repair cost of a vintage Eurotrash tube condenser microphone, you can buy a modern condenser microphone that will emulate a whole collection of vintage microphones. If that kind of analysis doesn’t convince you to reconsider tossing good money after bad, you are clearly convinced that there is something special from obsolete technology and I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) change that.