I'm a thirty-year-old puppy doing what I'm told And I'm told there's no more coal for the older engines,"—Andy Partridge, "Train Running Low on Soul Coal"
"[We] know the truth of this: We would likely live happily ever after with a system from nearly 60 years ago. An idler-drive turntable, some Marantz electronics, and Quad ESL-57s can be very satisfying. The main improvements to be made are not necessarily in the area of musical enjoyment, but rather boring old reliability."
Charley Hansen of Ayre Acoustics, who made these observations in an e-conversation two years ago, gives himself too little credit: He and many of his colleagues have not only made playback gear that's more durable than average, they've also succeeded in making playback gear that's safer to use and more portable, and that excels in performance areas where the gear of 60 years ago was often weak: noiselessness, timbral neutrality, the re-creation of 3D space, and realistically wide bandwidth.
Yet much of today's gear suffers by comparison in reparability—what else can we conclude from junkyards filled with portable music players, midpriced electronics stuffed with now-obsolete solid-state devices, and saddest of all, five-figure CD players. Today's gear has also taken similarly backward steps in some performance areas where the gear of 60 years ago continues to excel: impact, color, body, drive.
Monolithic agreement on which aspects of reproduced sound are to be preferred over others is neither necessary nor even particularly admirable. Audio-loving individuals are free to choose for themselves which criteria are most important to them—and, given the variety of gear on the market, new and vintage alike, the domestic-audio market of today offers something for everyone. Myriad points of view on the relative merits of, say, spatial performance and dynamic impact are only to be encouraged. But when it comes to serviceability, there's only one acceptable point of view: products whose makers can't or won't repair them more than 10 years after their date of manufacture are junk.
In last month's Stereophile, in my most recent of an ongoing series of reviews aimed at hobbyists preparing to buy their last digital-disc source component, I wrote about the Bryston BCD-3 CD player. In gathering the background material for that piece, I asked Bryston's James Tanner about the third-party disc transport—typically, the CD-player component most subject to obsolescence—used in the BCD-3, and he assured me that Bryston buys them in sufficient quantities to keep those players playing for many years to come: a good thing. (I also find it reassuring that Bryston has their own US service facility, as opposed to farming out repair work to an outside contractor, as is done by many manufacturers and distributors of very expensive gear.) Props are also due to Audio Note—whose managing director, Peter Qvortrup, says he's stocked literally hundreds of their preferred transports—and Luxman, which has taken the extraordinary step of designing and manufacturing their own transports. These people make perfectionist audio look respectable.
Sadly, other manufacturers of note have left customer support on the scrap heap—also the final resting place for their megabuck CD players, some made as recently as 2004.
I've spent some time scouring the Web for horror stories about some of the more notorious tits-up CD players, and what amazes me are the excuses some consumers make for these manufacturers. Mostly, they boil down to "Gosh, computer chips are improving so fast, it's no one's fault my CD player can't be fixed." Sure, your 20-year-old, $1500 Apple laptop can't be serviced because too few people are willing to pay to restore such a thing to the performance standards of 20 years ago. But for consumers who, in 1997, spent $20,000 on a CD player that's now deader than Julius Caesar's dog, restoration to the performance standards of 1997 is all they ever wanted. But they can't have it, because someone declined to buy a few hundred extra Philips CDM4 transports when they were still available, and is now unwilling to spend a dime on the engineering effort required to retrofit a contemporary substitute.
How strange that, by comparison, if one of the genuinely rare tubes or passive parts in any of my Shindo Laboratory amps or vintage products should fail, I can find replacements and effect a repair without a great deal of trouble or expense. CD player excepted, nothing in my playback system is likely to be scrapped—ever.
What can you do? As always, vote with your dollars. Before you buy any expensive audio product, call its manufacturer and ask them what measures they take to guarantee future supplies of replacements for parts that are subject to mechanical wear or thermal stress: not only transports, but motors, output transistors, output modules, integrated circuits, and tubes. (I mention tubes last because, between military surplus and the many tube factories presently operating in the black, tubes are kinda not the problem right now.) But I would approach with caution—or not approach at all—the many manufacturers who've abandoned their expensive CD players but are still in (profitable) business and still make good-sounding gear. If they've screwed their high-rolling customers once, they may well do it again.—Art Dudley
