Reliability of Cary Audio Products

Had my AES Sixpacs and AE-3 DJH for 2 years now, and have put on a fair number of hours on both pieces. No problems at all.

I bought a used Cary SLI-80 here on Audiogon about a year ago. I've had a 308T cd player for about 6 mos. I've used both pretty much daily with zero problems, plus they sound great!

Krellm7...Have YOU looked inside a Cary?

I just purchased the 303/300 (3 months ago) after owning the /200, both trouble free...obviously the /300 is an infant.

The inside of both chasises is a work of art, beautifully laid out...it looks as though EXTRA care as gone in to the "guts" of their gear.

Cary is also homegrown...made in the USA. That still means something to me...and their customer service is excellent with the ability, if you need repairs, to ship the product and get it fixed domestically.*

That said, I've never had an issue with Cary products.

Disclaimer

I DO own many foreign products and enjoy them...including sound gear...B&W, Denon, Mitsubishi, and more...so I'm not bashing overseas products...just happy to support an excellent American company.

"If you open one & look at it, it looks like a big mess of wire"

well, duh! their amps are point to point wired. no circuit boards anywhere inside my cary amps. after living with point to point wired cary amps, a point to point wired supratek preamp, and a minimalist designed 47 labs souce, i understand what all the fuss is about when it comes to circuit design and implementation of short signal paths.

Ok - I could complain about a radio shack choke in my Rocket - but let's be honest - all chokes suck. All chokes should be easily replaceable in a couple of hours, because eventually they all fail.

"A mess of wire and not worth working on" though to me equals someone who is not familiar with tubes or point to point wiring philosophies and is NOT someone you want working on your three thousand dollar amp. Not seeing green boards and then saying "what a mess" is a sure sign you have the wrong technician. Most amps use smaller guage wire than you might think (most speakers use larger guage 18/16/14 and bigger caps) - usually 19 or 22amg - the Cary's use top o' the line 22amg Kimber and that's about $8. a foot (versus maybe I dunno $.20?), plus ceramic tube sockets and Kimber caps to start with.

A bad resistor is a classic story but not a bad one, and considering there are only about two dozen (high quality) ones in the whole amp, if you have an eletrical meter, which you should, just like it says in the manual, even if you are slow it can't take you more than half an hour to check all of them, and its almost always the one at the input tubes. It's a well known engineers very old way of protecting equipment: a resistor designed to fail that shuts down the amp during a power surge even when the fuses don't pop.