Capacitor plague

[Vintage]

Thought i'd share this interesting article I found a while ago

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ems-capacitors

The reason for a lot of modern devices petering out after a few years is 'capacitor plague' which is an easy and cheap problem to rectify if you have a tiny bit of soldering know-how. I picked up a Yamaha YSP sound bar (the one with something like 40 1" speakers on it) that i'd wanted since the mid 2000s for £40 with capacitor squeal and fixed it for under £2, saving £800 on the RRP or £200 on a decent working used one.

The story behind capacitor plague is darn interesting, industrial espionage a la James Bond!

Stuff made before the caps problems tends to be as reliable as 70s and 80s kit, original PS1s covered in grot and pulled out the shed will pretty much always still play a game. Original Xboxes are bulletproof!

Crazy to think that a lot of 'recent retro' electronics kit has been/will be dumped when its fairly easily fixed with a new part that costs pennies

[ken70]

Re: Capacitor plague

i see 80 to 100 year old radios still working, i doubt in 80 years time anything sold today will still exist, it will all be in landfill - with the odd exception of stuff bought for archival by a museam.

[Richard1978]

Re: Capacitor plague

There is a community of people who do up old radios, the first generation of transistor sets are quite easy to work on with the right know how & equipment.