After spending my money on modern gear I now realize how much I want simple mechanical switchs and indicator lights, etc, on reliable non software based gear. My older gear might need recapping but it still works and doesn't brick itself.
Silicon for control and routing and even decoding, like the chips used in Toppings' devices, very seldom fail. When cheap manufacturers, for example, power them without proper filtering or regulation, or improper grounding and isolation, while the device works new out of the factory, as soon as the weakest link falls out of spec, that's when things stop working... Buttons stop registering or are pressed by ghosts may be the symptom, and this can be as simple as the singular 4 cent electrolytic failing that they greedily chose to filtering the extremely dirty 1.1V for the "core" because it had a bad seal and dried out. While this "undesired operation" might not kill the part, it won't operate properly, and it's at this point most things get thrown out, because they're held together with cheap plastic clips that are one use due to the plastic's low quality.
But if that silicon is surrounded with high quality ceramic on its pins and parallelled bulk electrolytic capacitors,
the board layout is done for proper grounding and minimizing crosstalk, quality solder is used, the board itself is quality, the solder job is done proper, then this type of premature failure likely won't happen to anyone ecept people who received bad parts off the line (which, unfortunately, does sometimes happen).
To have the rest last "forever" just don't use parts that degrade in 20-40 thousand hours, especially on things people leave on 24/7, or at least a few hours per day. (If they're done in 20, you see it in 5)
So instead of an LCD that's always keeps its backlight on, give the user the option to turn it off ( yes, even if that stops instantaneous response coming out of sleep. And if that's an issue for marketing, use a 30 minute timer, so that the
only one half second delay happens after the device is touched for the first time after being untouched for 30 minutes. So if you're listening to music you get instant feedback even after 5 or 6 songs in a row with no user input. Very often you're either interacting with the thing a lot, or it's just on and you don't touch it. Displays need to be able to be shut OFF! This goes for the elements in VFD displays they use in receivers - and what use is it leaving the element on, anyway? The display comes up in a small fraction of a second...
If these A70 Pro / D70 Pro Octo/Sabre allowed for the backlight to be shut off during "display off" or "auto [off]", longevity would be more than good enough! And the rest of the device is built to last! Which is why this is such a tragedy
My main DACs now are 2x D90 III Sabres, display is OLED. Even if the OLED can't be turned off entirely, its self emissive nature ensures wear won't occur to the display if nothing is on it (and there's a dim and auto off IIRC). I leave the D90 III Sabre displays on, and their OLEDs seem to be holding up much better than these LCDs.
I hope this was an oversight for Topping. They better get a better supplier who uses more LEDs for the back of the LCD... I don't know about this tiny thing, but it's probably only got 2 or 4 LEDs that cost 5c a piece "edge" lighting behind it (pointing in from the sides or one side (usually top or bottom)). If they designed the LCD light spreader to take light from behind (like array dimming on newer tvs), which wouldn't be difficult, they could arrange for there to be 20 or 40 of those same LEDs behind. Say they put 10x more and instead of 10 cents for the backlight, the backlight is now one dollar.
When you just double the amount of LEDs making a predetermined static (unchanging) amount of light, each unit gets to produce half as much so lasts at least twice as long. 2x as many, 2x as long, 10x as many, 10x as long. Goes from 20,000 hours to 200,000 hours! And in the real world, since the temperature of each LED would be so much lower from being spread out, and LEDs' lifespan is HIGHLY dependent on operating temperature - say you're going from a junction temperature of 65C down to 45C (pretty reasonable assumption). I just found this graph here from friend gogole:
So at 75 deg C, the LED reaches half its initial brightness at just under 100,000 hours. And at 45C, that same LED reaches 600,000 hours. 6 times longer!
So if those two LEDs in the original bad design were heatsinked really really well, instead of looking the way they will at 10,000 hours, they would last 6 times longer!
Well when you 10x the amount of LEDs, and stick them on a rear metal plane, and give them all just 10% power, they're effectively on a heatsink now and way over 10x the heat dissipation area. So we go from a 20,000 hour lifespan to 200,000 hour lifespan by 10x ing the LEDs, then we multiply their life by 6 for the 30 degree celsius lower operating temperature, which gives us 1.2 million hours expected life.
Since I first noticed a difference at around 3000 hours (I'm more observant than average and have a comparison device, that's much lesser used, beside), porting 3,000 and 20,000 to unknown and 1,200,000, our "unknown" becomes 180,000.
So by spending an extra 90 cents at the supply end, $5 at the consumer point, just 1% of these $450-$600 devices, they get to remain vibrant and properly coloured for easily over 200,000 hours to the average buyer. They might start noticing between 300,000 and 400,000 hours on. Since 100,000 hours is basically an entire decade, most people who buy this will be dead or near end of life before noticing the display change. For a 1% increase!
And the device, especially if you lose the remote, could become nearly impossible to use after 50,000-60,000 hours, maybe less if the speed of degradation increases from what I've seen
Actually, looking at the picture included about LED lifespan/temperature, you can see that the degradation is only going to quicken from here.
A/D70s could be dark by 40,000 hours if all those hours are at medium brightness.
By dark I mean like 1 nit, only legible in a pitch black room when you turn brightness to Max.
This got a bit longer than I anticipated. It's frustrating!
