Are High End Audio Products Unreliable?

I don't know how anyone can go from one anecdotal account of a failure to a generalization about the product, the company producing the product and the company's country of origin. Rush Limbaugh would be proud of such leaps of logic (supporter of healthcare coverage for contraceptives to slut demanding payment for sex).

There could be a variety of reasons even good product lines will have occasional problems that are NOT the result of trying to cheat the customer, cutting corners, etc. Sometimes the company gets a bad batch of parts or the parts supplier changes the part without notifying its customers. This can happen to a company with a great record for reliability and quality control. An example of that would be the brief period of time when Basis motor controls were prone to premature failure. I own a Basis table and I am amazed at the machining tolerance of critical parts--no discernable runout issues with any of rotating parts--something I cannot say for some of the tables mentioned above.

I have great respect for Nottingham tables. But, I knew a dealer that had a brief period when several tables suffered motor failures in a matter of a few weeks after the sale. The distributor said that one batch of motors from the supplier were bad. These things happen.

I don't think high end gear is particularly prone to such failures, it is just more painfull when something expensive goes bad. What I have found is that most high end dealers work to get things right and make the customer happy even when that means doing repairs for free well outside of the warranty period.

Perhaps some high end gear is more prone to failure because the typical high end "manufacturer" is a very small operation with perhaps one person doing all of the designing/engineering. That one person may not be the absolute best at all aspects of design (e.g., not a power supply specialist).

Also, with a small operation, there is less likelihood that a design has been tested to work under a wide variety of conditions. I know someone who had a DAC that was way too sensitive to static discharge (damaged from someone touching the controls). Likewise, I had experience with a phonostage that would shut down from the static discharge from a table/arm that was prone to such discharges no matter how it was grounded. Interestingly, both products came from Southern California--I bet they don't have the same kind of dry winter air we have on the East Coast. A friend had multiple failures of his tube amps made in England--the diodes in the rectifier simply could not handle the poorly regulated power of Northern Virginia (more robust diodes finally cured the problem.