Crest repair center needed

Re: Crest repair center needed

Alan Sledzieski said:
Josh,

I'll see if my tech will give me a copy of the say a hail mary before throwing power to it.
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Inquiring minds want to know.
All I can say is, all my amps went down on sub duty, along with other people I know, some of which don't belong to this site. Amps running mids and highs, never a issue.
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Sub duty is more average power, so harder work.
I know my tech said his biggest complaint of the 200 series amp is everything is on one board, so if you burn something up and burn the tracers, you have to buy a whole new board, I think around $1000 for a 9200. He showed me the 200 series compared to a i tech, which has many different moduals, so I can see some grief if you do smoke the board on a crest??
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If you tech ever decides to design power amps, ask him how much it costs to add the headers and connectors to connect all the small PC boards together? If you know what is going fail in advance to put it on an easily replaceable PCB, you can just use a more robust part for less cost than the extra packaging expense to break it out onto a separate PCB.

=======

I am not trying to be argumentative and I do not doubt you have an amplifier in need of attention. I am surprised Crest/Peavey has not been able to get you a workable repair solution. This isn't brain surgery, but soldering is involved.

JR
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Jack Keaton said:
Reality is it doesn't matter how many parts an amp has, if it goes down it still needs to be fixed. What needs to be figured out is DO YOU just have bad luck? or are YOU doing something wrong? Did you tap into some dirty power? I would call peavey/crest myself and ask them / send them the amps. If this doesnt solve the issue, I would get a brand that you feel you can trust and ditch the head ache. I personally do not trust these light weight amps yet, I think its a young technology that has some reliability issues that need to be worked out. I love my peavey and crest HEAVY as hell amps. They do exactly what I want out of them.

I am assuming the Hail Mary test is to blow the amp, Right now you dont have a direct answer as to what is going wrong (or didnt at the time) That most certainly would "let the cat out of the bag"
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Fwiw, I'm plugging the 200 series amps into the same places I plugged my ca aand v series amps into. I also check voltage before and during a show. I kinda know a lot about electricity, I'm a lineman, I have also lead quite a few venue owners in the right way to up grade their service for bands, or even simply running new circuits to the stage.

The hail Mary test had some thing to do with powering up a rail, ? if it goes wrong, there is a lot of smoke. This was on the 9200 my tech could not get running, he had NO issue getting the 8200 running, the parts are in the pic
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

John Roberts said:
Inquiring minds want to know.

Sub duty is more average power, so harder work.

If you tech ever decides to design power amps, ask him how much it costs to add the headers and connectors to connect all the small PC boards together? If you know what is going fail in advance to put it on an easily replaceable PCB, you can just use a more robust part for less cost than the extra packaging expense to break it out onto a separate PCB.

=======

I am not trying to be argumentative and I do not doubt you have an amplifier in need of attention. I am surprised Crest/Peavey has not been able to get you a workable repair solution. This isn't brain surgery, but soldering is involved.

JR
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I understand sub duty has more average power, you can easilly tell by the heat coming out of them.

As far as building amps, pay now or pay later I guess, it may be cheaper to build a amp like crest does on 1 board, but when it burns, you might as well throw the amp out at $1000 for the part alone?
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

All right everyone, I need a amp ( 4 total ) that does 4.5 to 5.5 kw bridged into 4 ohms, It has to be light weight, no dsp needed, and has to run on sub duty. WHATS out there ?
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Alan Sledzieski said:
All right everyone, I need a amp ( 4 total ) that does 4.5 to 5.5 kw bridged into 4 ohms, It has to be light weight, no dsp needed, and has to run on sub duty. WHATS out there ?
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Running an amp bridged into a 4ohm load is one of the more stressful configurations for the amplifier. Any chance you can reconfigure your load?
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

John Roberts said:
If you tech ever decides to design power amps, ask him how much it costs to add the headers and connectors to connect all the small PC boards together? If you know what is going fail in advance to put it on an easily replaceable PCB, you can just use a more robust part for less cost than the extra packaging expense to break it out onto a separate PCB.

JR
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Yep. Not to mention the extra reliability headaches brought on by connectors in this vibration-prone application.

Plus, board-level rework really isn't that big a deal for a properly equipped repair tech. Especially as the parts that fail tend to be larger packages.
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Rob Timmerman said:
Running an amp bridged into a 4ohm load is one of the more stressful configurations for the amplifier. Any chance you can reconfigure your load?
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Indeed this is more stressful, but for years Crest has earned a reputation for high current output, and all amp designs for about the last 15+ years have anticipated 2 ohm operation by customers, and all professional amps should even tolerate dead short circuits.

That said power amps do fail from time to time for random reasons. They are all (most) designed to be cost effectively repaired. One obvious exception to design for repair, was the early CE1000/2000 amps that used undersized emitter degeneration resistors, so when those amps lost a power device, the undersized emitter resistor often burned a hole in the PCB. I don't think this was a cognizant design decision to not make a repairable amplifier but an oversight by an inexperienced mechanical designer who just repackaged an old amp schematic into new SMD technology.

As others have stated the Crest PCB should not be a throw away. ASSuming it uses SMD, in the early days of SMD many were intimidated by board level repairs, but it isn't as hard, as figuring out "what" to replace, and there probably aren't any 0201s on a big dog power amp PCB.

JR

PS: Regarding "pay me now, or pay me later" for cost associated with ease of repair, I recall some 20-30 years ago when CS800 series amps were famous for ease of repair, and the design engineers put a lot of effort and some extra cost into that. Since then the consumers drove the trend for more power for less dollars, by rewarding cheaper amp models and brands that were less repair friendly. I notice that since I left the power amp game, the amps have gotten even cheaper, so good luck with repairing them. I'm so old I recall when $1/watt was a cheap amp. :)
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Alan Sledzieski said:
All right everyone, I need a amp ( 4 total ) that does 4.5 to 5.5 kw bridged into 4 ohms, It has to be light weight, no dsp needed, and has to run on sub duty. WHATS out there ?
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How about a Lab Gruppen FP14000? That's 4400 Watts at 4 ohms on EACH channel. Not a cheap amp, but very high quality, cuts down on rackspaces, 26lbs, and the amp will perform better in a stereo 4 ohm setting than bridged at 4ohms anyway. 2 of those and you're set with a nice small, light sub rack.

FP 14000 - The FP+ Series flagship | Lab.gruppen
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Rob Timmerman said:
Running an amp bridged into a 4ohm load is one of the more stressful configurations for the amplifier. Any chance you can reconfigure your load?
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Nope, Subs are double 18's.

Vinny D'Agostino said:
So have all the failures been while the amp is run in bridge mode?
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The 8200's yes, the 9200 in stereo on subs from another person I know

Silas Pradetto said:
The new Itech based Macrotech i 5000 would do that exactly. And they're cheap!
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Why do they do 4kw into 4 ohms and 5 kw into 8 ohms, that just seems backwards???? What do they cost ?
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Rob Timmerman said:
Yep. Not to mention the extra reliability headaches brought on by connectors in this vibration-prone application.

Plus, board-level rework really isn't that big a deal for a properly equipped repair tech. Especially as the parts that fail tend to be larger packages.
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What happens when the bord is burned and or the inside tracers burn?

I beleive I tech got rid of some ribbon cables?
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Alan Sledzieski said:
I beleive I tech got rid of some ribbon cables?
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So did the Crest Pro 200 series, and your tech obviously don't like that. You said so right here:
Alan Sledzieski said:
I know my tech said his biggest complaint of the 200 series amp is everything is on one board, so if you burn something up and burn the tracers, you have to buy a whole new board, I think around $1000 for a 9200. He showed me the 200 series compared to a i tech, which has many different moduals, so I can see some grief if you do smoke the board on a crest??
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You know those Crest Audio Pro 200 series amplifiers come with a 5 year warranty, right? It is right here on the spec sheet:
8200: http://www.crestaudio.com/assets/literature/specs/322_13011.pdf
9200: http://www.crestaudio.com/assets/literature/specs/322_7657.pdf
Right there on page two it says, "Warranty Five years parts and labor"... so I have to ask, are these things less than 5 years old? If they are, why are you absolutely REFUSING to send them back to the manufacturer's repair center and have them fix the units under warranty?

It seems to me that you are your own worst enemy here... by not allowing the manufacturer the opportunity to even attempt to help you.

It has pretty much been a day and I've not received any messages from anyone regarding this matter. I'm asking everyone now, if you have experienced any sort of systemic issue, PLEASE send me a message!

Likewise, I still have yet to see anything about this "Hail Mary Amp Test" and where it came from.

I do not mind of someone has unpleasant things to say about a product. I actually like it because it shows me what people don't like. But, if you want to complain about it, please be prepared to back up your statements with facts. In this case I have yet to see any sort of facts about anything. All I've seen is a lot of typing.
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Amps are 2006, I saw the tech, read the hail mary test, as a authorized dealer he would not give me a copy.

This test came from crest / peavy. But I did right it down.

Nov 5, 2003 rev 03

Hail Mary power up test.
Turn off the signal generator output, connect the supply to the variac, there was a lot of other steps then it says, WITH THE INPUT SIGNAL OFF, SAY ONE HAIL MARY AND TURN ON THE FRONT PANEL BREAKER WHILE OBSERVING VOLT METERS.

Another test involved this,
Short circuit test,
Do to this test with extreme caution as a nasty failure can result,,, then it tells you everything to do, the last sentence says, IF THE ROOM IS NOT FILLED WITH SMOKE, PROCEED TO THE NEXT STEP.

So if you were in my shoes what would ya do, with these not so great outcomes, and not so professional sounding phrases ?

Amp was out of warrenty at the time.
 
Re: Crest repair center needed

Alan Sledzieski said:
Amps are 2006, I saw the tech, read the hail mary test, as a authorized dealer he would not give me a copy.

This test came from crest / peavy. But I did right it down.

Nov 5, 2003 rev 03

Hail Mary power up test.
Turn off the signal generator output, connect the supply to the variac, there was a lot of other steps then it says, WITH THE INPUT SIGNAL OFF, SAY ONE HAIL MARY AND TURN ON THE FRONT PANEL BREAKER WHILE OBSERVING VOLT METERS.

Another test involved this,
Short circuit test,
Do to this test with extreme caution as a nasty failure can result,,, then it tells you everything to do, the last sentence says, IF THE ROOM IS NOT FILLED WITH SMOKE, PROCEED TO THE NEXT STEP.

So if you were in my shoes what would ya do, with these not so great outcomes, and not so professional sounding phrases ?

Amp was out of warrenty at the time.
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While the details would help (maybe not me that much since I don't have a schematic handy), the "Hail Mary" reference sounds like a service tech trying to inject some humor to defuse an angry situation.

Shorting the output, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is something a healthy amp should handle easily and a broken amp, can proceed to finish failing.

If your amps are out of warranty you are responsible for the cost of the repair. In my estimation the "hail mary" troubleshooting, did not break your amp, It was already broken and the service tech was trying to help you troubleshoot the problem, and confirm it wasn't something simple.

It is common for power devices to fail as a short circuit and that often cause a cascade of failure as other parts connected to them also get compromised.

If you no longer trust your amps, that is understandable, customers get snake bit all the time. I suspect you can find somebody to take them off you hands.

Good luck.

JR
 
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