I cringed when I saw the title of this episode, and sighed when I saw the orange fascia of that amp.
It brought back a lot bad memories, memories of getting multitudes of those amps landing on my service desk( my second ever technical job), smelling of burnt components. Normally once a week and some days 6 at a time.
The story about the lack of coupling capacitors is true, and it resulted in a lot a burnt amps.
For some reason my company was the middleman between the Railways and the manufacturers (Jands?). Each burnt amp would come back with a huge repair bill from Jands and my boss then told me to double the price, before passing it back to the Railways. I actually was told not to fix anything as it was all paid by the Railways.
Then all the amps that went out initially had to be recalled thankfully, to have coupling caps put in, at the same huge markups. Something like 4 inline caps wired into the loom costing hundreds of dollars in 1990s prices and then x 2.
I guess the things that really irked were the waste created by this fuck up, because that's what it was, and the obvious price gouging of the government and the fact that I was part of it.
Eventually I think it came good, and the dreaded orange amps became less numerous in my workshop.
I guess there were a few lessons in this to those who are interested and to those who got burnt.
Test before you make and install hundreds of these things. Things rarely work first time.
Dont rely on the spec, you have to look into what the customer really needs as well as what they have specified, they are human and not normally experts, sometimes just cut and paste merchants.
If the spec looks stupid ie. 1 pair of wires with 50 different jobs, the result will be stupid, they should have run more cables. (Ok I will admit that they were never going to do that, but running more cables would have been the real solution.)
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