D200 Mod 2.0.1

[Pim]

I am interested in the rational behind these modifications, that is what issue exactly are you trying to mitigate?  Please don't take this negatively, I am not dismissing your good work here, I am just trying to understand it.  In fact, I have quite a history of 'modding', although in my case with cars, not electronics.  So I get the pleasure of all this, driving a quick car is fun, but driving a quick car that is quick because you have rebuilt and modified the engine yourself adds an extra level to the joy!  I presume the same thing applies to hifi.

So, back to these pin connectors.  Is the idea here to replace the pin connectors because they are a 'weak link', with the pin itself or the soldered connection of the pin offering higher resistance versus a decent soldered cable?  As it happens, I did experience a car breaking down once.  The fault was with the relay that switched the fuel pump, this had a pin connector that must have been running as a high resistance connection, had been getting very hot and had actually burnt the solder around the connection.  At a glance, this looked like a perfect soldered joint, but looking closely, you could see the solder had burned away from the pin, leaving the pin running through a perfect cylinder of solder, but connecting nowhere by an absolute fraction of a millimetre.  This was a hard fault to find, but was fixed in about 10 minutes once found.  It didn't need large cables to fix though, just decent quality soldering.

So, I can see the issues with pin joints, they are a bit fragile, but I am thinking that if the soldered joints are high quality and executed as they should be, then all should be well.  Is this not correct?  Can it be shown that they offer resistance?  Although noting Antoine's experience with his 250 Pro which required remedial soldering on delivery, maybe Devialet's execution of the soldering of these pin joints is not the best?  I have no idea, I've never ventured inside mine to take a look!

Hello Confused

I think it is not the soldering alone that is the problem here, but the metal (purity) of the pins and the how good the contact is. A connection like this can easily be or become nonlinear and introduce distortion. So it is not just the resistance of a connection but the complex equivalence which includes capacitance, inductance and diode-like properties. Of course if the PCB trace is too thin this can also affect current delivery.
Your car example is good, but here it is either a voltage connection or none.

I can shine a little light on the ring around the pin issue from experience. A long time ago, back in the Netherlands, I worked for an electronics repair shop. I was just a shit kicker picking up and installing the stuff but one of the things I did learn was the 'ring around the pin' problem. It happens mostly on high current items such as transformers and transistors in the power supply of the old TV's (Think 70's-90's). They expand and crimp every time the machine gets turned off and on and over time the solder breaks and the ring appears. It was so common in TV's that even though they could be repairing something completely different in the TV, it was common practice to re-solder those known high current points as a preventative measure. 

To give you an idea of how common it is; I've kept my old Sony TV going for 23 years just by re-soldering those points every two years or so. And even when I threw it out it was still working. I just found out that an outgoing 32" model would just fit in between to cupboards and the new model didn't so I decided to bite the bullet on a flat screen TV before the old girl died.