Peavey IPR2 amps?

Re: Peavey IPR2 amps?

Josh Millward said:
You mean unlike all the other amplifiers which blow unfiltered air through the chassis too?

News flash, not all amplifiers have filters on the fans. This is nothing new.



Where do you get this stuff, Brent? I ask because I'm pretty sure you didn't get it from Peavey.

Sure, any electronics that live in a dirty environment should be cleaned, but these amplifiers are not any different from others. A more aggressive cleaning schedule is not required.
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Actually, I DID get it from Peavey. The engineers through Marty McCann, who told me personally, said that it is imperative that these amps stay cleaned out, more so than CS series. They said dirt build up will be the number one outside contributor to failure. Thanks for being so course and assuming the worse.

I believe Marty is on record on the Peavey forums addressing the issue as well.

If you work for Peavey, and your opinion differs from theirs, walk down the hall and have a chat. Now that Marty is retired, give him a call.
 
Re: Peavey IPR2 amps?

Brent Handy said:
Actually, I DID get it from Peavey. The engineers through Marty McCann, who told me personally, said that it is imperative that these amps stay cleaned out, more so than CS series. They said dirt build up will be the number one outside contributor to failure. Thanks for being so course and assuming the worse.

I believe Marty is on record on the Peavey forums addressing the issue as well.


If you work for Peavey, and your opinion differs from theirs, walk down the hall and have a chat. Now that Marty is retired, give him a call.
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I need to preface this with the caveat that I have never seen inside an IPR, or even been in the same building as one. I am not surprised to learn of people hearing different "official" advice from Peavey. This is the nature of having more than one employee. If we really want to know we could ask the actual design engineer (probably JD).

I just downloaded the owners manual and do not see any special instructions about regularly cleaning the amp. If these amps were unusually sensitive to internal tidiness, I would expect some mention in the OM.

I am aware of things like this being a known consideration for amp designers inside Peavey (at least it was over a decade ago). I recall discussions many years ago about an alternate more efficient heat-sink approaches that we dismissed because they were notorious for clogging up with dust and not being effective the way Peavey customers are inclined to use amps.

I do not doubt that Marty has encountered some funky dirty CS800 old soldiers in his numerous 3rd world travels.

I can imagine crud inside an amp being a failure issue if the environmental contamination was electrically conductive. In general non-conductive dust that interferes with heat transfer would likely just cause the amp to thermal cycle, not die. Since the amps are probably engineered to be very hard to kill, perhaps conductive contamination is a major vector for the few that do fail. Dirt and moisture (or liquid and dirt) could be conductive, but in general we try not to expose much high impedance active circuitry to the forced air flow.

Perhaps the IPR series is different but I do not see any indication in the OM that special attention is required.

As Josh said it is good practice in general to periodically clean all amps that get exposed to dirty environments.

JR

PS: This is perhaps another reason why most fixed install amps use passive cooling when they can. They tend to collect less detritus inside.
 
Re: Peavey IPR2 amps?

Tin whiskers have been known about since the '40s. They have re-emerged as an issue due to ROHS, lead-free solder requirements mainly for EU countries, but the electronics manufacturing industry has pretty much gone lead free across the board. These whiskers are fragile and perhaps blowing a high pressure air hose on the PCB would dislodge any whiskers that are growing from there.

I have used lead free solder with some pretty fine pitch SMD chips with no problem (so far), but only for a few years now.

Marty was warning about tin whiskers back in 2010 on prosound forum and I asked him then if Peavey had experienced any tin whisker caused failures. He did not respond to that question. So I still do not know wrt Peavey.

OK I found the smoking gun..on the Peavey forum
marty sez said:
Now I am going to prophetise: "When it comes to newer technology Class D amplifiers with the super small subminiture surface mount devices and the extremely close spacing of the numerous legs on the integrated circuit engine chips, it will be absolutely necessary to perform the above cleaning out regulary"
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"Prophetize" means to make predictions about the future... For the record Marty was mainly a clinician and educator, not a design or manufacturing process engineer. He often repeated stuff he heard from engineers inside the company, or the service repair technicians, but not always in perfect context. Marty was generally correct 99.9% of the time but I had at least one run in with him back in the day when he misunderstood a "fact" he learned from one such engineer that he was applying incorrectly. I didn't interrupt him in the middle of his seminar class, but approached him after and it was just as well, because he proceeded to argue with me about it. :) That would have been awkward for all of us.

You can do far worse than listening to Marty. 99.9% is a good percentage. And cleaning out your amps every 6 months generally will do no harm, but if it was necessary to prevent failures, it would be in the owners manual (or should be).

JR
 
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