Lifespan of a quality solid state amplifier?

> Filter capacitors have a half life of about 20 years.
> What that means is that in a 20 year period, about
> half of the caps will have failed. This is true of
> transistor and tube amps.

Ralph, I would call this MTBF, or mean time between failures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annualized_failure_rate

"A vendor-quoted MTBF implies that half the drives in a large population will fail within that time of operation."

If in technical school they used half life, I would suggest they either got the term wrong or the definition has now evolved into its current usage as "the period of time it takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half."

the twenty year half life thing is just wrong and does not apply. No amount of posting will make it right. Half life refers to radioactive material. And it is not mean time between failure. MTBF most often is measured in hours.

Did you know on average caffeine has an 8 hour half life in your body?

Rok2id, Half life can refer to radioactive material, but radioactive material is not the only thing measured in half life.

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Here is another concern. My company has been dealing with this for several years now. The caps in the computers that run our equipment are failing at a very high rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I agree that MTBF is not applicable when talking about caps. It applies to complex equipment that needs to be repaired and put back into service. The time it takes a cap to fail is simply lifetime. Failing caps may lead to a lower MTBF for whatever they are installed in though.

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