No, the 5.1 that I bought smoked from the main preamp itself and not from the external power supply. I also had a friend whose SA-11 literally burst into flames!
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I wonder where they would be today if that never happened.Actually, after the Counterpoint demise, Michael Elliot returned with a new company Alta Vista Audio which was a repair/update company of older Counterpoint products. This resolved all past reliability issues with the many levels of updates being phenomenal. And then in the mid 2000's, he created a new company, Aria Audio, to do a new design of ampsÂ….and then a few years later, the outstanding WV5 preamp. I own the WV5 and I would put this line stage up against anything today. The MM phono stage is outstanding, but the MC stage is a pair of Sowter step-up transformers which are ok, but some pre-preamps (head amps) outperform the SU devices. Finally due to health reasons, Aria and Alta Vista Audio ended in 2012 or so. If you go to the website, here you are likely to get the answers you're after. As for tube-based products going up in flames, this is always a possibility. Audio Research went through a nasty time in the 1980s as well with their D250 stereo amp. And I had many events with an ARC VT130 in the 1990's with a tube failure causing a power resistor to explode causing quite a smoke bomb in the room. And the CAT amps which I now own can result in serious destruction upon a tube failure if the unit is not powered off immediately upon a tube failure. For those people which have all these claims of Counterpoint issues and other tube products not also being vulnerable to sudden disasters, either have not lived with tube products very long, or have been very lucky to not yet have experienced such an event. |
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