Line 6 X3 Live

Before many of you say "wtf yus,I thought you won't accept Line 6 repairs!" okay,okay, please read my reason. So the guy call me up asking if I could have a look at his X3 live, I mean to his defence, he couldn't have possibly read all of my past post about that. Who does anyway? I remember a complaint made by an English man about my write up. It goes something like this "it has no punch and I couldn't understand it".

Of course yours truly won't be bothered by a person who's been living in a bubble his whole life. How about he tries some Bahasa Melayu for a change. I tell him this though. It's the easiest language to speak and write. It's the only language I know on earth where the vowels sounds as it's supposed to every time all the time. You don't have words pronunciation conflicting the spelling e.g.Cut is Kat,Cat is Ket. Put is Poot not pat, but is bat, but then bat is bet which will sound like bed in some parts of Asia where he would pronounced it as Eisha.

I digress. One day I'll put a sticky label up there telling what product I don't accept for repair.

Coming to this Line 6, the complaint was no sound and sometime if you're lucky it will go to tuner mode after several long step on the foot switch I mean foot controller.

I ordered a bunch of tactile switch (red one) but they arrived different from the actually picture on their website. See, even renowned component companies cuts corners today. LOL

So I nip off the tactile top and it fits great. Looks the same after well almost. I did replaced all 12 as precaution. Save the owner 11 times of his future visits to my workshop. Time is money, at least his money to me. LOL.

But the X3 Live did have sound from the day it came in until it left my workshop. I check-out Line 6 forum for tips or whatever and it turn out these kind of problem relates to the DSP and its surrounding area which are impossible to solder without a 36X Zoom soldering microscope. Maybe I need those someday, thumbs up China for many low to high ranges offered but anyway most of the answers in the forum suggest sending it in to Line 6 mother ship. Do the math, what's the time frame and repair/shipping/handling/insurance cost from Malaysia to USA and back? It's a long term gain if Line 6 were to fucking train the distributor tech dept. about the proper tools, its complexity and know how on fixing Line 6 own fucking products. Sure sounds like I’m admonishing a China company. Well at least they’re getting better biennially while a particular American company(which is now owned by Yamaha Japan) keeps telling us to abandon the old models while at the same tine trying too hard to shove new products into our throat? Sounds like Apple too ei?  I guess that's that then.

Oh ya one more. The X3 live was quite dirty so I dissemble it cleaning the metal and plastic parts in my sink. Is this safe to do? I don't know. I just do what's natural. However do not do this if you think you might break something or unable to put it back together.

Actually there's a dead Line 6 Spider Valve 112 laying here for a while now, yes I lied again. So stay tune for more reliability issues with design for SMD/SMT technologies. Indeed I will put to the test the efficiency and cost of sending a board to Line 6 mother-ship.

Thank you

yustech