[LAU] Audio interface for newbies ?

[jonetsu at teksavvy.com]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:49:03 +0100
Will Godfrey <willgodfrey at musically.me.uk> wrote:

> I don't know if people are generally aware of this, but round about
> the turn of the century, the market was flooded with cheap
> electrolytics from Taiwan that were made with a defective
> electrolyte. 

Found out about this when one of our more recent Viewsonic monitor
suddenly failed.  Which was surprising since mine, a VP211b, is in
service, always powered on even when the computer isn't, since 2006.
10 years without any problems.

The story behind this, told by a colleague, is that a Chinese company
has pirated only half of the plans to make capacitors.  Their recipe
left out the most important part.

This is so much of a known problem that capacitor kits are available on
Amazon (or Amasszone if we go by David McCandless' book "The Internet
Now In Handy Book Form") for specific monitors.

> Apparently these are *still* turning up in new equipment
> and are extremely difficult to identify until they fail :(

IMHO I don't think these faulty caps are still used today.  They were
quite precisely identified since then, I think the company went over,
and people do not want to use them in their products for obvious
reasons. 

Cheers.