2016 Connect AMP


Recently my connect amp would power up for a second then the light would go dark. Opened up a ticket and they came up with a “power failure”. 

The call center said I will need to replace my “old” unit for a new AMP.  The cost will be $459!  I paid $500+ for the Connect AMP in 2016 and didn't power it up until April 2017 when we moved into the house.  Where is the reliability?  There is no servicing of the Connect AMP???

There are no authorized service center’s for these units.  This seems super shady! This is the kind of shady tactics State’s Attourney Generals like to know about. 

 

I have no less than 8 Sonos units in our home. Heck, the Play 3 we purchased back on 2011 and it still going!  


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Userlevel 6
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I've had numerous devices over the years - all of which are still working.... apart from a gen2 Connect which failed after 3 months use.  There's definitely a reliability issue with some batches of the Connect. 

Servicing modern consumer electronics is a difficult business. Products are mostly machine assembled and a lot of glue is used to hold them together. Servicing is a labor intensive project that can involve damaging some of the cosmetics. Cost of service to the end user can easily approach 50% or more of the original product cost. The most cost effective approach is usually replacing major sub assemblies that have been machine assembled along with the original product production run. This implies that someone must purchase an inventory of original subassemblies on speculation that they will be used for future service. It is not practical to restart an assembly line to produce a few subassemblies in the future. In many cases the original parts are no longer available and new production of subassemblies is not possible. This subassembly inventory is an economic risk because it may never be used or may become failure prone simply because of its age. All of these costs are factors in the cost of service to the consumer.

We don’t know the failure rate of CONNECT:AMP. To some extent forums such as this are like hospitals. After a short walk through the hospital it seems obvious that ’everyone’ is sick. One might be able to walk through a service center and see dozens of ‘Model A” and assume horrible reliability when in fact reliability is excellent because this is the entire population of failed units out of a production batch of hundreds of thousands or millions of units.