It appears to be a v2 amp because of the 7 fan blades:
But then I noticed few traits that my other 0.5s don't have.
1) burns on the fan board by the resistor:
2) strange angle to the rectifiers:
3) the side blades (not sure what they are called) came off when I removed the end plates. On this amp they are cut into 3 pieces each and are screwed onto the heat sink plates.
4) this s/n seems a bit on the low side. Must have been early in the production run
I also recall seeing printing on my other boards saying ZPA0.5v2. Don't see that on here.
So as I took the covers off I felt that the gold traces are shinier than my other amps (maybe I am crazy).
I knew that the caps were replaced as they weren't original values, but not sure what to think of this...I know that the m series had caps hot glued together, never seen it on a ZPA.
And then when I looked under I made some entirely new observations:
2 bad cap vias:
Fets were replaced (probably upgraded, I will verify later) but no damaged vias:
Not a huge fan of the soldering job done to the caps:
And looking closer at the repair job when the fan resistors were replaced, not a huge fan of the job done here either:
I powered the amp up and it works. I checked the cd offset and it was less than 1mv on the right side but about 7-8 mv on the left. I adjusted it down to less than 1mv.
On this amp I plan to replace the caps again, but with 8200 uf caps. I also plan to remove each heat sink and replace the thermal paste with the Antec formula 6 stuff that I used on the other ZPA. This way I can further check the fets to see which ones are in there and inspect for any burned parts.
Any feedback? Anything that I'm missing that I should look for.
