okgb said:
My daughter worked at best buy and a large amount of stuff got returned , not working right out of the box
No product is so cheap that a major percentage will be tolerated DOA, but onesy-twosey failures happen.
I'm never surprised to see where chinese products cut corners, but one friend insists that it's how the product is spec'd
in regards to components & such .
That depends on the failure mode. A solder fault like this post is about is likely (factory) process management, design (solder connection integrity), or lastly material (cheap solder)
Another friend who works at a music store says that product can be purchased with different
levels of QC ,
QC (or QA) is an after the fact barrier test to find faults, not very efficient. In manufacturing I prefer SPC (statistical process control) where you constantly sample and tweak the manufacturing process to be near perfect, never allowing the process to deteriorate to the point where outlier faults occur.
With a global supply chain, surviving the stress when a container gets dropped onto a dock from tens of feet high, robust design, and good packing design matters. I worked at Peavey last century even before the China manufacturing became pervasive. We shipped containers world wide and it becomes part of the process to build stuff well, and design it to survive. Even then stuff happens. I recall wrestling with the last generation of heavy iron power amps. The new lighter weight switching stuff made the shipping pack a lot easier to deal with.
Many premium small company products would incorporate a level of QA after landing in the destination country to cull out infant/shipping failures. Cheap products don't justify the extra cost of an extra barrier test, but like I said the market will weed out too many failures in a single SKU.
I've stopped being tempted to buy ultra low cost free postage ebay internet stuff , there's always something about it
like buying dollar store stuff, that's not worth it unless you are expecting disposable , and even then.....
You generally get what you pay for (BTW there is no such thing as free shipping... I recall pricing sacks of cement with free shipping that cost like $20 compared to <$5 picked up at the hardware store).
Unfortunately we live in an age where repair of many goods is impractical. One of my solar powered driveway lamps went out... for only a couple dollars, in what world does it make sense to repair it (while I did repair them several times over the years out of curiosity more than actual benefit.).
JR
