Hi, I've been using the Moon Neo 430 for 7 years now. Last week I was listening to music for four hours straight. Today the Neo 430 wouldn't turn on. Has anyone had a similar experience in the past or what could be the cause?
I had a similar case and an unpleasant experience related to the behavior of Simaudio and the service center. I bought an amplifier in the summer of 2015. After purchasing, I replaced the fuses myself with "Hi-Fi Tuning" fuses and photographed the inside of the amplifier (this is important). At the end of 2019, my 430HA just wouldn’t turn on, so I contacted an authorized Simaudio service company. They told me that the warranty had expired, and that the power supply needed to be replaced, which would cost about 500 USD. I agreed, and the repair was done.
In August 2020, I decided to replace the fuses with more expensive ones—"Audio Horizon". When I opened the amplifier, I saw what had actually been replaced during the repair. It was a single part costing about 8 USD (I had paid 500 USD for the repair). I found the Simaudio distributor’s website, where it stated that in my country, Simaudio has a 10-year warranty (which made me think I had been cheated and shouldn’t have paid for the repair). I wrote a complaint letter to Simaudio and the distributor.
The Simaudio representative responded to me:
"This amplifier your purchased was sold in 2014 when the warranty was not yet up to 10 years but 3 years only. For over 15 years, the warranty in the export market was of 3 years. This is why your service call was processed as an out of warranty repair.
It’s only in 2015 that we have started to announce to our export partners that what we are selling them, as of January 1st 2015, systems covered against manufacturing defect for 10 years. Please note that this was not retroactive to precedent inventory they had, but only applicable to merchandise purchased from us, to partners, after January 1st 2015.
We’re terribly sorry that you came across a failure with your system, however you did find a trusted authorized service center that were available to fix your unit in an acceptable lead time. We also were able to identify the part that was replaced to be legitimate as current 430HA’s have the same as used in you repair.
However, the labor rate or pricing of any businesses in other markets is unfortunately not up to debate as we are not in the same situation economically and geographically. The priority for MOON by Simaudio is for their MOON partners to find one trusted local authorized service center to whom we can share our intellectual property. In this case Red Service with which we have had no problem in over 20 year we have been doing business with Qvinta.
And after some time, I discovered that the user manual for the amplifier had a revision date of ‘April 2015’ (I might be wrong about the month). This means Simaudio was blatantly lying to me (since I can’t verify the date the distributor sold the amplifier). I wanted to take legal action, but I changed my mind, as my time and expenses for the process would have been higher. In the end, I will never buy another Simaudio product again.”
