Who here has been personally victimized by an active speaker (besides JBL) that broke on them?
Ooh, me! I had
M-Audio DSM1s that died after five years of use. They were pretty advanced for 2009 (SMPS, DSP, analog and digital inputs, class D) and reviewed as quite good performers. An ambitious design by what was normally considered a budget brand, trying to move upmarket.
The reason why I picked them up was because they were on fire sale for $360/pair, which was a good deal considering Sound on Sound found them to be something like a discount K+H O110.
Unfortunately, despite their high aspirations, they were still by M-Audio, which is probably one of the lowest tier brands for studio monitors. So even though the MSRP was $1300... There’s tons of threads online about these monitors crapping out because they cheaped out and used no-name, underspecced electrolytic capacitors for the SMPS that die in a short period of time.
Also, they hissed, and the digital input was temperamental and would occasionally blast me with full-scale noise whenever it desynced for whatever reason. I don’t think the DSP/class D/digital input studio monitor design concept was fully baked yet at that point.
I learned my lesson and replaced them with KH120s. At least I know they didn’t cheap out on the caps
Eventually every electrolytic cap will dry out, but I expect these to go for 10-20 years before needing servicing. I’m also pretty sure Neumann/Sennheiser will still be around to perform said servicing, while the same can’t be said for companies like M-Audio (they don’t even take in the DSMs for servicing anymore!)