I understand. But to be blunt, in this day and age there are more companies who copy schematics and put it out as products then companies doing original design. In fact some of our early group diy work was used by a few companies. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. But it happened. So I see why companies hesitate. To me an NDA really shows a you are serious about protecting their stuff and just fixing your stuff. I have a few with different companies for that reason.
Unfortunately, it’s not “lost”. It exists still.
Yes I can attest to that. My last stint the big thing was board swaps for field guys unless it was something super simple. Then the boards came back to the mothership for rework and back into the cycle of use for swaps. While this does expedite things, it really isn't a healthy option IMHO. The better option is field board repair if and when possible as it is the fastest way to resolve things.
I think it is important to distinguish between professional and consumer/semipro suppliers. The professional ones know their customers will want their gear to be earning as much as possible all the time and they cannot afford the time or effort to deal with sending items off for repair. It needs to be fixed now and that is why they have an on site service department who will make repairs. For this reason they provide full service info. For consumer/semipro, little if any of the above applies.
Trying to repair a friend’s Eventide H910 was the most humbling thing I’ve attempted to fix. It took me less than an hour to figure out that the PSU voltages were all bonkers because the power transformer was wired for 220v, instead of 110. I corrected that and changed one of the regulators, then the power was normal, so I had high hopes that I got off easy. Nope. I pulled every one of the million tantalum caps to test them, poked around for a few days after that, and eventually gave up.
