I've been using this amp almost everyday from pretty much release and I haven't had any issues with it, probably bad luck tbh.

Same here

I’ve been using mine for a couple years with no issues other than it has a scratchy pot on the volume control. Too bad about the reliability issues as I agree it has great functionality, perfect front panel layout, and unmatched volume knob.

Weird. Mine was from the second drop, which I received in January of 2019, and I haven't used it much in the past year, but I fired mine back up just to make sure, and it still works fine.

Perhaps, as with a lot of things, the quality standards aren't the same as pre-pandemic times, which is a shame. :(

companies should not be allowed to sell shitty hardware like this. amp/dacs usually just sit on a table without much physical movement. you should contact customer support and accuse them of knowingly selling shoddy hardware because it's the second one that died on you, and see if you can get a warranty or possibly a refund. if not, try contacting your bank and give them screenshots of both your receipts for buying this item twice and maybe a bunch of screenshots from other people having issues. see if your bank will stand by your side and force a chargeback. if not, then the best you can do is sell both your amps "as is" on ebay to recoup some of the costs.

Are you running it with any kind of power conditioner?

Mine's been good since release. Any particular source of static in that space? I have a friend who fried quite a few things due to a carpet.

Been using mine since December 2019. 5 to 12 hours + daily and no issues.

Everyone saying “mine works fine” but when I was researching this amp I kept seeing stories of it just randomly not working one day. It’s a shame cause it’s a nice looking amp with some nice features and specs.

Ditto. Mine has been super solid. Little bass heavy but great amp over all! Though recently bought a Burson Soloist 3x thinking "Gonna be diminishing returns..." and immediately after hearing it thought "Must listen to all my music for the first time... Again..." Simply shocked at the level of sound some of my cans are capable of. Especially the Open Alphas I made. Didn't expect them to hold up to and IMO trounce HD800S and OG Clears....

It's normal because it's far more likely for someone to complain if there's is a issue than if there's not. You won't hear the "review"of your average joe who's amp just works.

To be fair to OP, most amps you can buy don't need one so that would still be a big flaw with this product if it did.

I've had mine for years and it works fine...

If the difference between broken gear and working gear is a 100$ Furmann, its not a big issue. Anyone running pro audio gear in a studio uses power conditioning.

Using one can eliminate in-house power issues. It very well still may be the Drop amps, by design.

>Anyone running pro audio gear in a studio uses power conditioning.

But this is not a pro audio product, it is a consumer product meant to be used by consumers. It is an issue because the competition doesn't have this problem and at no point should a company expect people to know and use power conditioners for their audio when most of the time they aren't needed. They don't advertise or advise consumers to use one.

>It very well still may be the Drop amps, by design.

Definitely possible.

FUCK! Guess who just blew his 789 moments after making the comment. I accidently peaked the PC volume so the amp turned off and now I can only barely hear the music with max output on a sensitive headphone. The headphones are fine so I'm surprised the amp would die. Need to look into if it can be fixed. I repeat, FUCK!

Yes thank you I’m aware of this phenomenon. That doesn’t cancel out the considerable amount of reports.

I would advise anyone with electronics they care about to use a power conditioner. Computers, active monitors, any audio gear with a plug that can carry 60 cycle hum.

I've had mine for a couple years and have had no issues whatsoever. TBH its the first issue ive heard over this amp as its known for being reliable, clean and detailed. Sorry you had that experience.

u/uqil one thing I might mention that I had one issue with the THX 789 and that I didn't realize it had an AUTO OFF SWITCH on the back and it confused the hell out of me at first when I'd leave the amp on and Id come back to find it turned off a short time later.

I would check to make sure your auto off switch is disabled if you are having issues with it turning off randomly. It took me some sleuthing to figure out what was going wrong.

Mine died about a month after release and drop replaced it. The best thing I ever did in my audio journey is get rid of that piece of shit. Not a single amp I've owned since has sounded anywhere near as bad as the 789. It's a wholly shit amp with extremely poor detail and control in the subbass. They fucking suck.

Mine was fine apart from the knob giving the amp considerable channel imbalance, which is unfortunate even at its price tag. Thankfully mine was still under warranty. I described the issue to customer support and they just sent me the full refund back, which was cool.

Edit: too bad you basically become a stranger to the customer support once your warranty comes to its end. If I,m buying something as stationary and single-purpose as a desktop amplifier, it would be nice to at least be able to have it repaired.

I have a Monolith THX AAA 789 and it seems to work great, however I have heard the DROP version isn’t the greatest.

Annoying scratchy volume pot which I disassembled the whole unit, cleaned the pot and had great results... for about 3 weeks until it came back. Otherwise performance is great, but feel it should do better on that pot.

The vast majority of 'power conditioners' are basically 4-way extensions inside a rackmount unit. You basically get a surge protector, an EM filter, and maybe a rack light or a little voltmeter.

The only way to actually 'condition' your power is to use an inline sin wave UPS. Fortunately these have become inexpensive these days, so do that, rather than pissing around with a Furman.

I had one from audio gd I never turn it off and it never had issue.

I don't have Drop THX AAA 789. I do have its little single-ended brother Drop THX AAA One. Still under warranty. Fingers crossed it will continue to work well.

Here is my take. The issue is entire consumer market. Most consumers buy products for value (cheaper the better). Besides a small minority, most are not willing to pay more for quality.

The result is that manufacturers and merchant just focus on building the cheapest product. $250-$300 for THX AAA 789 was a greate deal. I am sure there wereshort cuts. Such as using cheaper components, reduced quality control, reduced testing, etc. And result is likely slightly higher failure rate. Hard to say what that failure rate is. Is it 1/100, 1/1000, etc?

And there is no guarantee that cheap product will fail prematurely. Or high-end premium product won't fail. So on average, most consumer still wins with the value products.

I mean…yeah I was tempted on eBay by these too, but seeing so many broken ones online gave me a reason to doubt their reliability.

So are you looking at Monolith 887 now?

What about the THX balanced that’s so sweet?

Ouch, bad luck.

Someone that made of fortune on GME or AMC or BTC buy this man a Christmas miracle! I would do it if I had ever been able to get in on any of my many market insights.

Other than a scratchy volume pot that developed after one year of ownership, and after the one year warranty expired, I didn't have any other problems. The scratchy volume pot was easy enough to fix. Just slide out the amp by pulling it out via its faceplate after removing the back screws. Applying deoxit to the volume pot shaft was all it took to fix the issue and it has been running fine ever since. There could be one or screws underneath that needs to be removed too, but I could mistaken for the MCTH whose scratchy volume pot I fixed the same way.

Mine came from the third drop, which was before Massdrop's rebranding to Drop, and has been sitting boxed up in my garage for the past year.

I also have a 2019 unit, and I've been using it constantly since then. No issues on my end.

I've been using one daily since the first run of them and have never had any issues with it.

Well if one particular amp/headphone is getting more complaints than others than it’s a sign.

Never had an issue with mine, great build quality for the price. Mines been sitting in a cupboard since I've gotten my singxer but still a solid buy.

So sorry for your issues. Hate to sound like a broken record but I too have never had a single thing go wrong with my 789. It has been one of the best purchasing and most dependable and amazing sounding products I've purchased for my audiophile life.

I have the Monolith version and everything has been great with that one. I've had it for over a year and I got it used.

The Monolith is more reliable than the Drop one. Bought my Drop one last holiday season and it broke after 3 months of use but that one was on me because I was running cans on the Balanced XLR using a 3.5mm to XLR adapter + daisy chaining one too many adapaters (Terrible Idea and such a noob mistake of me. You can get away with 3.5 to 2.5mm/4.4mm adapter, but NEVER with an XLR.) Nowadays, I stick to SE to SE and Balanced to Balanced to ensure proper load and longevity of the AMP. Drop amp eventually tripped the OCP and stop powered on ever since.

Bruh

This is a valid route. But just keep in mind if you do a chargeback the your drop account will for sure be banned.

average drop product qc issues

Both my Schiit amps have super scratchy pots to the point I bitch and moan on the daily :).

No, but reporting bias is, however, related to the total number of experiences/devices in the wild, in general.

So, if you have a very popular, very hyped, relatively inexpensive, "pretty much end-game" amp that, say, 100,000 people buy, and you compare it to an amp that only 10,000 bought, and 0.1% have problems, you might hear 100 bad stories of the popular device, and only 10 bad stories about the less common device.

So, let me ask you: do you know how many 789s are out there?

Do you have a recommendation I can add to my Amazon cart?

I can almost guarantee you, if you actually asked "How many of you have no problems with yours", you're going to get more stories of a good time being had, than you are going to get stories of failures, using your post as-is.

Products that reach consumers rarely have as high of a failure rate as social media/bad reporting bias would lead you to believe. It's some small number of units, for any product, ever, that sees failures. If a product sells a million units, and a different product sells ten units, and there's a 1% failure rate across both products, you'll never see a single complaint about the rare product, but you'll see ten thousand complaints about the popular product - despite the failure rate being the same*.*

I bought my 789, used, on Ebay. I've only had it for a month - if it explodes into a billion pieces, I'll let you know.

And then I'll probably fix it or something.

There’s no way for me to know that. If I did and it turned out that only 1% of these amps failed, that would be good enough for me to take a chance. But we don’t know, and that’s why we can’t completely ignore negative experiences, especially when there’s no recourse.

No worries. I'll order an L70 or SA-1 today ;)

You don't have data to determine the scope/range of the data you do have... so you're just going to go ahead and take the data you do have as fact/the whole picture, and call it a day?

We don't know, therefore we should not accept the negative reviews as representative of a good cross section of the population.

...

Anyway, the number is approx.15,600.

"22.7K requests·15.6k Sold·" -drop.com

So, if you've actually seen more than 156 reports of failure, then I guess don't buy one.

Yet OP is 0 for 2. I wonder if he reported it online the first time, since anyone with any problem posts on Reddit about it apparently.

For international customers IMO the real issue is not the relatively high failure rate of these amps (although I think it's a valid question why such simple and low wattage devices fail at all), but the fact that Drop only ships replacements upon receiving and verifying the faulty unit. This takes about 2 months (from personal experience, way before the pandemic). Drop is also unable to provide any technical support or parts replacement, so you wouldn't even be able to pay them to fix your unit.

Between this and the Drop panda which similarly died randomly after a few months (to Drop's credit, in both cases they accepted a return and full refund), I decided never to buy any Drop electronics. Sure miss the massdrop days when they were offering all sort of interesting stuff from established manufacturers at good discounts.

Mine was the Nov 2019 batch. Still going strong and never a sign of trouble using it daily.

Mine is from the first Drop branded batch. Used pretty much daily since I got it, still working fine.

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Damn, is the Clear really that much better with the Burson? I use mine with the 789, the Burson stuff looks really nice but they are expensive

I got the sense that it'll quit after a couple years or so in, seeing them frequently for sale online for Parts. The original, non-Drop THX amp (forget the model number? with the digital display, I rarely see for sale used, and people still pay a good amount for it - little doubt that it's built better.

But there are other amps in the similar price range that have a noise floor nearly as low, and inaudible in any case, you might check out. Topping, SMSL?

I’m still works. I bought it used after my schit died…. I hope I didn’t make a mistake! I use it every day.

it's definitely a much bigger jump than I was expecting! Not sure what kind of magic they are bottling but it's pretty nice. Could just be my expectations were so low that any improvement was a major wow! Was running a 789 prior to the burson. I wouldn't get the Burson for the clears though. I still run my clears on my xduoo ta-26. The clears love tubes. Heard the Rebel is a great solid state amp to pair with em. A bit warmer and more tube like. Got my Burson open box so round 700 ish.. worth it and then some. I use my open alphas on it as well as my hd800s. The clears I run on it from time to time but mainly they stick to tubes.