Fun Hardware Facts
XA100 Owner’s Manual
Speaker cables should be firmly tightened down at the speaker output terminals, but not with a wrench. Output terminals will not withstand the levels of torque that may be easily applied by wrench. Hand tightening without excessive force is plenty. Cleaning contact surfaces with one of the commercially available electronic contact cleaners should be part of your annual system maintenance.
The XA100 has a single large power transformer, under actual conditions in the amplifier, it supplies but a fraction of its rated power. This very conservative rating contributes to exceptional voltage regulation figures and low noise figures at the loudspeaker.
The XA100 has a significant number of power supply filter capacitors. These caps are used to create the unregulated output stage rails at plus and minus 30 volts at 7 amps. RC filtering is used to passively remove ripple from the supply rails.
All the power transistors in the product are
So how long will this hardware last? It is our experience that, barring abuse or the odd failure of a component, the first things to go will be the power supply capacitors, and from experience, they will last
15 to 30 years. Fortunately they die gracefully and are easily replaced by a good technician. After that, the longevity will depend upon the number of operating thermal cycles, but we can say that we have had amplifiers operating in the field in excess of 20 years with no particular mortality, and we don’t have good information beyond that. More to the point, you should not worry about it. This is a conservatively built industrial design, not a frail tube circuit run on the brink of catastrophic failure. If it breaks, we will simply get it fixed, so sleep well.
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