Quote Originally Posted by Desertboy View Post
Morning, unsure what you decided for drivers but if going the Leadshine AM882 route I'd order them now took about a month for mine to arrive from Hong Kong.

You can buy EU equivalent Leadshine EM806's but they're twice the price and the specifications seem identical both made by leadshine. AM882's you will not find available from UK seller if you do link me to him please lol so i can buy another 4. The only difference I can see between the EM806 and AM882 is they have different dip switch settings relating to auto motor setup but both support autotuning making this an non issue.
I would only ever buy Leadshine drives from a reputable source, as there are a lot of counterfeit drives about.

Personally, I've often wondered why the AM series got discontinued so quickly, but I suspect it was to do with forgeries. IIRC Leadshine superseded to the EM series in well under 2 years, but by that point you could pick up the AM drives cheap in lots of places. So either there was some major internal redesign, or they needed to get a step ahead of forgeries. I suspect the latter, and the AM firmware was easy to retrieve (the Chinese are renowned for their ability to extract such things, using methods you wouldn't think were possible), and the EM not so, which is why it's not yet been copied.
Most older digital drives are copies of Leadshine, which in turn were re-designed copies of Geckos, so you can't say Leadshine are just a victim in the whole counterfeit drive area, but they at least build reliable drives, and didn't deny for years they had an inherent design flaw which meant they could randomly blow up during power up (it's a shame JohnS isn't around anymore, as it's what ultimately forced him to use Chinese drives, and he liked a good rant on the subject).