As many of you know, I am a retired American expat who lives in Boquete, a little town in the mountains of western Panama not far from the Costa Rica border. When I make purchases online, I have the packages shipped to a forwarder in Miami, and it costs about $12 dollars to get something the size and weight of a PA3 to me here. Returning items under warranty is not easy, and is expensive, so I try to be quality conscious.
I've purchased two Topping PA3 amplifiers in the past year, and both died - the first one was an $84 Amazon one-day special I stumbled upon, and it lasted seven months before dying. It simply stopped putting out signal to my speakers when I turned it on one day. The second one was a $65 "Used/Like New" Amazon purchase, and it died the same death after only about one month.
My audio system in my little budget retirement rental house consists of a dual-boot
Intel NUC running Daphile or LibreElec Kodi which is connected to a
SMSL Sanskrit 6th DAC via Toslink digital optical . RCA's connect that to my amplifier. which , drives a pair of
Paradigm Atom v6 monitors. No exotic components or weird loads in the chain. Our flaky "developing nation" 125v mains power is stabilized by an AVR unit (automatic voltage regulation), surge protection and battery backup.
With the 2nd Topping now out of commission, I have reverted to using my backup DAC/amp - an
SMSL Q5 Pro.
I will not buy another PA3, but I do have a
Topping DX7s DAC with a volume control arriving from Massdrop within days. It will be paired with a
100wpc Ghent/ICEpower dual mono (200ASC +200AC) balanced input power amp. I just received the Ghent case from China, and will be ordering the modules from "Parts Express" in the U.S. in June when everything I need is in stock.
I couldn't figure how to get the Topping PA3 case apart, and removing the three screws on the back did not release the back panel - I could see that the speaker connectors were holding it on. I managed to unscrew them, but doing that broke the solder connections to the vertical PC board just inside the back panel. The second picture is the back panel flipped over on top of the case.
There may be screws at the end the long round center channel in the sides that also takes the two back panel self-tapping screws (see pictures below. Because of my limited experience with PC boards, if I can remove the "innards", the only thing I could do is to look for bulging capacitors and obvious loose connections. I think I will try the town's electronics technician at the local repair shop - he seems to be quite good at fixing all kinds of modern electronics. If I get one of the two PA3's back to working, I will be happy.