Actually, both amps were "SOTA" as of last summer. The demised one was the "all new" unit, the survivor the "veteran", but with red board installed at the same time as the new one was built.
Further interrogation of my son revealed that the amp died early into Spiderman (I) on DVD, not prior to plasma activation. Even more mysterious, that DVD won't load now on the DVD player.
Anyway, what's somewhat troubling is that the Stratos' internal protection circuitry was not able to prevent catastrophic transistor failure. While those of us with a few years in electronics know that "the transistor protects the fuse by blowing first", the amp is designed to prevent (blatant) suicide attempts.
So the exact sequence of failure events remains mysterious. Did the cleaning ladies short the outputs by shifting the amp? Was there some kind of tranient glitch in the DVD that excited a heretofore unknown weakness in the protection scheme? Or is this a case of one-year-old transistor mortality arising from a bad silicon batch? Only the Shadow knows ...
