Yes, all electronic equipment needs periodic maintenance.

Pretty much everything made by humans requires some form of periodic maintenance, such as cleaning, lubrication, adjustment, or parts replacement, so this should come as no surprise. Complex electronic equipment, containing hundreds of parts and often operating decades beyond its intended design life, is certainly no exception!

Design Life

Manufacturer-specified maintenance information is typically found in the service documentation for a piece of equipment. Here’s the problem with that, though: This maintenance is what was thought would be needed over the projected design life of the equipment. When this equipment was designed and built, nobody imagined that it would still be working, let alone cherished and sought after, 30, 40, or even 50 years later.

There’s often very little longer-term maintenance information accompanying consumer-level gear like this anyway, a reflection of the nature of the equipment and its predicted lifespan. The extended life much of this equipment enjoys is usually well beyond its intended design life, and the ongoing maintenance needs are simply not covered by service data.

A classic example is bearings and gears designed to last the life of the equipment. These, in fact, usually need to be completely stripped, cleaned, lubricated and reassambled for that equipment to ever work properly, after about 20 years, for example.

Keeping equipment running requires experience and an understanding of how equipment ages. Many service procedures and techniques have been developed by Liquid Audio and other professionals. I use service procedures, parts, lubricants, etc, that manufacturers didn’t disclose or that have become superseded. I’ve had to reverse-engineer and develop solutions, as required. Some of them are unique to Liquid Audio, and I regularly have people try to steal these trade secrets!

Magic Smoke

Owners of hi-fi equipment are often unaware of maintenance requirements or that components degrade over time. Eventually, mechanical parts seize or fail, and the ‘magic smoke’ is released from electronic components, leaving hi-fi equipment no longer functional. *

Having established that all hi-fi equipment needs maintenance, it may be intuitive that the more complex the equipment is, the more maintenance it typically needs. Turntables and cassette decks are generally the most maintenance-intensive, followed by amplifiers, CD players, tuners, preamps and then things without knobs, like DACs, roughly in that order.

I’ve written more about how and why electronic equipment needs periodic maintenance here and here. Periodic maintenance reduces the likelihood and potential severity of equipment failure and dramatically improves its performance. Whatever you do, just have the work done by someone competent. Your equipment will eventually fail if you don’t maintain it.

* When magic smoke is released from an electronic part, that part is broken forever. Magic smoke cannot be ‘re-instated’, only new components containing their factory original magic smoke perform to specification.