Creek 5350 channel dropout?

To make a long story short, I had the ribbon cables removed and the connections hard-wired (cost = $250).

Apparently the plastic connectors at the free end of the cables sometimes come loose from the pins they fit over. The suggested solution - bending the pins apart to produce a tighter connection - did not work for me. I also discovered that it would take a longer period of time to replace the cables than I was willing to wait, and that I could not be guaranteed that the replacements would not develop the same problem.

The improvement, and I don't just mean solving the channel drop-out problem, is extraordinary. I don't know if this would improve the sound of a 5350 that works perfectly as intended (I do not have a new 5350 to compare my amp to, so this is entirely from memory), but all I can tell you is that I believe the amp now sounds significantly better than new.

As for the use of ribbon cables in an amp to carry analog signals, there seems to be quite a bit about the subject on the web. Owners of this amp can examine that issue for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

Once again, the sound of this amp is now beyond anything I expected and quite extraordinary.

I had channel dropout problems on my 5350SE also, but having contacts cleaned at a repair shop fixed it.

By ribbon cables, do you mean what the company refers to as "computer grade flat cables"? How, and with what wire, did you hard-wire?

Yes, all three "computer grade flat cables" were replaced. I did not do this myself, a highly qualified tech did it. I examined his work when I received the repaired unit back, and it looks like the same "point-to-point" wiring you'll find in most Chinese amps. The three flat ribbon cables were each replaced with numerous ordinary thin, round, insulated wires. In any event, it works.

I had also previously had the contacts cleaned and it worked for some time, then the problem occurred again. I sent the amp back several times to a tech (recommended to me by Roy Hall) in LA (from the East Coast to the West Coast) and that tech cleaned everything; and he pulled the cables off the pins they were pushed on to, cleaned the pins and cleaned the connectors at the end of the cables - the whole works. The tech told me that this was a common problem with the amp - the connection between the cables and the pins loosened over time.

After three times of this back-and-forth, I had had enough. When one channel dropped out again, I decided I would send it to a tech on the East Coast, pay whatever I needed to pay and have it fixed once-and-for-all. The tech on Long Island told me that he had worked on this amp many times before, and had replaced the flat cables and "hard-wired" the connections. I sent the amp to him, and after several weeks (and after he told me that it was turning out to be a really tedious job, and after he also tried ordering new connectors for the flat cables but these were not spaced correctly and had to be discarded) he entirely replaced the flat cables with the plain wiring I previously described. I suppose you could have someone wire it with silver cable or something exotic; I just wanted the amp to work without any problems. But as I said, the result was better than I expected.