I can't remember if I've told this story here before -- my brain she don't work so good anymore -- but there's a new twist ending so bear with me.
A few years ago, three or four, I took an amplifier into our nearby highly rated professional audio repair shop and asked if they could replace the burned out meter incandescents with LEDs. Seemed like a reasonable enough request.
Well I didn't hear from them for a couple months -- it was my subwoofer amp, and I was using a spare in the meantime, so I kinda let time slip by -- I finally realized they still had my amp so I called them. They couldn't find it. I'd taken it in on a Saturday, when their computer system happened to be down, so the bench tech had written me a paper receipt and said he'd enter it into the computer when it came back up. So it turns out he never did.
After a lot of back and forth over about another month they finally located it. It had been dropped accidentally off the workbench and the back was all smashed in. It was a big heavy 200 watt per channel amp, about 7" high and 50 pounds, so when it dropped it destroyed the connectors on the back panel, broke the circuit board inside, bent up the heat sinks, etc. Pretty much trashed.
They offered it back to me, in a box, no charge.
I was incensed, and complained all the way up to the owner of the company. He admitted they'd fucked me over pretty good, and offered me, I dunno, $125 or something for it, saying that was the current market value of a ten year old Yamaha power amp.
I negotiated it up to about $160 I think, and brought the thing home. Spent a couple of nights trying to rebuild it, but eventually gave up.
Since then I've been running on my backup subwoofer amp, a Nakamichi 50w amp. It's a nice amp, but a little underpowered. Meanwhile I kept my eyes open for another used Yamaha power amp.
Time passed.
I worried that my woofers were crapping out. They could be heard clipping on loud passages, becoming nonlinear, making sounds that weren't in the recordings. I've been shopping online for woofers for a couple years, but the ones I have (and used to love) -- JBL 124a's with 4" voice coils and 19Hz resonance -- are not easy to replace. I've seen a few in the $450/ea range, some even more, but with no way to preview them or check them out in person I hesitated to drop almost a grand unheard.
The new house will come with a music room. I plan to idealize it as much as I can afford, and that included (in the back of my mind) replacing my failing woofers.
So I was shopping around online at some local hifi dealers last weekend, and lo-and-behold, I saw a Yamaha power amp for sale. Woo-hoo!
So I quick like a bunny picked it up.
The left channel on Speakers A doesn't work, but that doesn't matter because Speakers B does. Been playing with it for two days now.
You know what? My woofers don't sound broken anymore. With 153 watts/channel behind them instead of 50, they don't make rude sounds at high SPLs anymore. I guess it was all amplifier clipping I was hearing, not woofer failure.
In fact my stereo sounds better than it's ever sounded before.
Wow, that was unexpected. Saved me about $700 too. (And the meters work.)
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