Bench data
What actually fails on PS Audio.
1,309 repair records mention PS Audio — power regenerators, DirectStream, and the power components. In counts, the story is one thing: the supply inside the supply.
Full disclosure before the numbers: PS Audio is the brand we see most at this bench, so it's over-represented in our history by design. That's the point — power components are the repair we actually do, and the pattern is consistent enough to write down.
How we count
- 9,561 repair records in the training corpus: forum repair discussions and bench transcripts, tagged by gear type, symptom, and topic.
- Per-brand counts here are keyword co-occurrence across those records — a record counted once per brand and per symptom it mentions.
- These are conversation counts, not diagnoses: they say what people talk about when a brand comes up, not what every unit on earth fails with.
Counts computed from the database, August 2026.
The product is a power supply. So is the failure.
Regenerators and Power Plants are power supplies that clean power supplies, and they run hot by design. The corpus reflects it: 223 transformer mentions, 187 power-supply mentions, 178 fuse mentions — the highest fuse count of any brand in the database. When a unit dies, it's almost always its own internal supply that went: electrolytics baked by years of heat (102 capacitor mentions), a fuse that finally gave up, or a transformer pushed past its thermal budget.
Hum and buzz are the top reported symptoms
210 hum mentions and 73 buzz mentions — together the most-reported symptom family for the brand. The honest read from the repair history: a regenerator that hums is usually telling you about its own aging supply, not the power coming in. And buzz that appears when you add the unit to a system is often a ground reference fight between the regenerator and the components behind it — the fix is in the system, not the unit.
Check the unit's own supply before you blame the wall
The most common mistake in the records: chasing the incoming power when the unit's internal caps have aged out. If a Power Plant or DirectStream is acting up, the check order is: fuse and mains first (cheap, safe), then the internal supply caps, then the transformer. A recap of the unit's own supply resolves a large share of what actually shows up.
Before you open it
- Capacitors hold charge. A power regenerator's supply is the last place to poke around hot — discharge before touching anything.
- Hum that appeared with the unit? ground reference fight — try a different outlet first, not a new unit.
- Fuse blowing repeatedly? that's a symptom, not the fix. The supply is failing downstream.
Not sure what's wrong?
Describe the symptom to the Customer Service Wizard. It's trained on this exact database, plus bench experience, and it will tell you what to expect: likely fixes, effort, and whether it's a bench job.