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What IS build quality?

Build quality is one of those phrases bandied about by people who may or may not actually have any idea what build quality IS or is NOT.

Heavy can be 'good', if applied in the right place. A steel chassis? how about MORE heat sink?
Or maybe a real thick, machined (CNC) Aluminum face plate?

Circuit boards? I've worked on plenty of non-audio equipment. I've had to replaced traces burned to charcoal and other assorted goodies. One thing that always told me 'quality' was a sort of green epoxy circuit board. It was translucent to light and you could see an internal pattern to it. Very strong and fixable. Some cheap stuff used boards, which could be nearly any color, but when replacing a trace, were found to be similar to compressed cardboard. Burned traces were found to be CHARCOAL and would still conduct. You had to SCRAPE it all out as part of the fix.

Parts and parts selection. It has been noted PLENTY on a number of threads that resistors, for example, can be noisy and some prefer the various film types. What about caps, the 'other' most used part? Or GENERIC Opamps, to replace say the well known OPA2134 or the like?

I suspect that even IF (not gonna happen!) a company like Emotiva built from the SAME schematic as say, Bryston or Classe or Pass, that the amp would not only NOT be as good but would last a fraction of the time.

Any thoughts on 'build quality' and how YOU evaluate it?

You may feel free to toss in any cynical comments about 'worth 3x its asking price' or 'hits well above its weight' or even 'XXX is overpriced mid-fi'.




Too much is never enough

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Topic - What IS build quality? - pictureguy 19:40:23 11/28/14 (109)
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