The No-Fly Zone

Over the course of my lifetime as a low-key audiophile I have bought a fair amount of audio equipment. Most of it is well-made, reliable, and performs as it should. In most cases, I have updated from a product only because I want something with better or specs, or perhaps some winsome little something of an audio product turned my head.

But there have been other products, the ones that fail early in the game, the ones that have

quality-control failings, the ones that have caused me trouble and bother long before their time. I have a simple rule for such products – I return them if possible, but more importantly, I never buy from that manufacturer again.

Herewith I present my trio of no-fly zone audio companies, each richly deserving of its place on this list.

SAE

"Scientific Audio Electronics" is a fairly old and generally highly regarded manufacturer of expensive audio products. In the 1980s they produced a lower-priced line of home audio dubbed SAE Two; I purchased the integrated amplifier. It was a cool-looking thing, to be sure, making effective use of rocker switches in the place of the usual knobs, and with nifty-looking LED panels. Kinda counter-intuitive to use, but once you figured out which rocker did what, all was well.

But some of those rocker switches didn't even work right out of the box. I took it back to the store and the folks there sprayed them with something or other. They worked a bit better, but never well. I was a foolish young man at the time and so I didn't insist on a refund. I should have. The silly thing broke for good and I took it to the one and only warranty service in the SF Bay Area. Said service center went out of business. Some months later I was able to pick up the untouched component. It went into the trash.

As a coda, I should mention that my Conservatory bought a bunch of those same amplifiers for the classroom sound systems. Not only were they difficult to figure out for most of the faculty – even just finding the volume control was challenging – but they were all broken before long.

For all I know, SAE makes other equipment that's beyond criticism. But these SAE Two jobs were below criticism. No-fly zone from then on, and forever.

NAD

Another three-letter audio company, NAD achieved a kind of audiophile immortality with an early integrated amp that cost very little but performed massively better than its price would suggest. It's an audiophile legend, that amp, and for good reason.

Thus known for making solid, low-priced stuff, NAD decided to go after the higher-end market with their "Master" series of components. The M3 integrated amplifier was a gorgeous piece of kit, a dual-mono design with lots of power and really terrific sound quality.

But it didn't work very well. Operating it depended on your being able to read a LCD panel while turning the one and single front-panel knob; under one setting it was the balance control, under another it was the volume control, and so forth.

Fine. But the LCD panel starting burning out early on, and that big front-panel knob started getting seriously screwy. You tried turning up the volume and it got quieter, or didn't respond at all. Eventually you couldn't see a thing on the LCD panel and the big front-panel knob was useless. You could still use the remote control, but that didn't have all the features.

I bought it on the cheap (floor model) so I didn't have a warranty to fall back on. It went into my upstairs audio-visual walk-in closet, where it remains to this day.

More to the point, NAD landed on my no-fly zone from then on.

HiFi Rose

Recently I was subjected to grinding disappointment with a very fancy audio network streamer, the HiFi Rose RS130, the product from one of the more interesting Korean audio companies. Gorgeous thing, to be sure. But it went dead after two weeks.

Fortunately, I bought it brand-new from Crutchfield, and they have a Nordstrom-class warranty for everything they sell. Back it went for a full refund.

I checked around and discovered that a lot of peoples' RS130s had died early on. I discuss this entire issue here.

Thus HiFi Rose became the newest member of my no-fly zone as a result.