Fake MN3007 Chips

4114Effects

Bought 3 different MN3007 from sellers on eBay to use in a Electric Mistress Clone. 

Two refuse to work at all, one produces a tiny amount of flange along with a massive hum, as well as being too hot to touch after a couple of seconds.

Circuit has been tested with a genuine MN3007 I pulled from an old Boss chorus pedal and works perfectly, so I know it's definitely the chips. 

Don't want to waste anymore time and money trying other eBay offerings. Anyone know of a reliable UK source for them? If not I guess I'll be putting an order in from Smallbear in the USA.

Bah.

marauder

Been there.

Get them from Das Musikding or Banzai in Germany, they work.

juansolo

With the closure of Dr Tweek, Das Musikding is where we get ours.

Most of those ICs on ebay are fakes. Well apart from the 4x MN3005's we're selling, but they're no good to you for this.

Danny1969

I brought some NE5532 IC's on Ebay and they are fake, some kind of lesser dual opamp without the driving capabilities repainted as 5532's ...... I mean they are faking a 30 pence chip to look like a 73 pence chip .... you would have thought it wasn't worth doing but I guess they are doubling their money
Annoying from a design point of view as I doubted my own circuit design before I twigged

ICBM

I've been stung a few times as well, both with chips and transistors. I suppose I should have learned by now! It's usually not so much that I'm trying to save money, just that often the proper suppliers no longer do them or have annoyingly long delivery estimates.

4114Effects

Yeah seems to be getting worse. I've had terrible sounding 4558 chips, j201 that leak badly and of course horrible PT2399 to name but a few. Think I'll abandon eBay altogether as a source of components. 

thermionic

With something like these BBD chips, my guess is they're not fakes, but rejects that don't fulfil the specs on the datasheet and were binned by the manufacturer. Producing a chip, real or fake takes a tremendous amount of resources. I used to work in the chip industry, and faking was a problem, but the fakers have to have access to the litho mask data and a multi-million pound fabrication plant to produce them.

lasermonkey

Been there, done that.
It doesn't seem that long ago that you could get ten 3007s off eBay for a fiver and they'd all work. Out of the last 30 I bought, precisely one of them worked. I got refunds, so no money was lost, but it's still a pain. None of them passed audio and most of them got hot.
They were all "pulls", and I suspect that they've probably been harvested by a four year old holding the circuit board over a fire (I've seen this on news reports). If the ICs aren't buggered by the heat, they'll have been zapped by static discharge.
I think I got my last few from Musikding. Not cheap by any stretch, but at least they worked.

jpfamps

I rarely buy components from eBay.

The price should tell you they are fakes.

4114Effects

jpfamps said:

I rarely buy components from eBay.

The price should tell you they are fakes.

Yeah haven't bought any for a while as I had a few in stock, so wasn't aware how much they'd gone up!

Should have learned my lesson with the batch of eBay 600v caps that went leaky within a couple of hours running an amp build ...

ThorpyFX

4114Effects said:

jpfamps said:

I rarely buy components from eBay.

The price should tell you they are fakes.

Yeah haven't bought any for a while as I had a few in stock, so wasn't aware how much they'd gone up!

Should have learned my lesson with the batch of eBay 600v caps that went leaky within a couple of hours running an amp build ...

Yeah that's just plain worrying, 

4114Effects

ThorpyFX said:

4114Effects said:

jpfamps said:

I rarely buy components from eBay.

The price should tell you they are fakes.

Yeah haven't bought any for a while as I had a few in stock, so wasn't aware how much they'd gone up!

Should have learned my lesson with the batch of eBay 600v caps that went leaky within a couple of hours running an amp build ...

Yeah that's just plain worrying, 

Haha yeah, I should clarify that they leaked DC rather than physically leaking on the amp ... although if I'd left them in long enough, who knows ...