Sorry guys, have to butt in again, too much shitting on the poor Blast.
I would call a Blast City an advanced level cab for the following reasons....
Monitor - Semi curved tubes are NOT easy to find...so if yours is burnt or dying, its going to mean a lot of work to hunt a replacement, or tube swap.
Net City will have the same problem.
Power Supply - due to the harnessing, the PSU block is also quite the pain. Cabinets like the Aero, can easily have a different PSU adapted in. Blasts make this extremely difficult.
Never had an issue with a Blast PSU. I've had SUN PSUs die on me, Blasts no. Easy to recap even if you've just picked up a soldering iron.
Blast I/O pcb - excellent for versatility, but another complication in creating things like cps2 kick harness adapters or other options.
If you don't want to run wires straight from kick harness to the buttons (which IMO is perfectly fine), you can connect them to CN8 on the IO and you have them then on the 10-pin AUX connector next to the 1P and 2P controls. What cab is somehow better? Astro for one are exactly the same, just with a different connector.
Cabinet - Monitor is difficult to get out, and must come out to be worked on. Cracks at Control Panel intersection with cabinet, fiberglass unibody, makes getting to things a pain and damage harder to repair.
Monitor is admittedly harder to get out, but I can still take out a monitor and put it back in maybe 1/10th of the time it takes me to pull out a monitor from an Astro. No, I don't want to do it daily, but honestly, unless the cab has a rotate mech, it's not something I want to do with any cab. Also, top tip for owners, when you have the monitor out, make sure the bolts are correctly aligned. Realigning them is really easy to do and makes the procedure
waay easier in the future.
Cracks are purely superficial. I had Bishi Bashi in a Blast for
years, people hammered the shit out of the CP. It's still perfectly fine.
Pros for Blast:
Will run Jamma, JVS and Sega Model 3 with OEM harnesses. Super versatile
PSU is a beast. More amps than in other Sega sitdown cab (NVS-4000-01 is the same)
Control panel being removable is great boon to anyone that ever needs to move or store the thing. I don't see how it is a con in home use (although it stands up just fine in arcade use too). How many of these have you seen broken?
Cons:
Poor corner convergence on the MS2930, 31 & 33 (again, same problems on the Net City)
15khz looks wrong (problem with every tri-sync chassis ever made, Tosh PF included)
No perfect replacements available for the speakers if they are shot