This is essentially a solid state amp so before I get shot down in flames, my defence is that there is one valve in this amp which is there to warm up the sound. This Ashdown Evo II 300 Â is a 300 watt amp with twin 12 inch speakers. It is very well constructed with great access to the key parts of the amp This Ashdown Evo II 300 was distorting and sounded terrible. When […]
The Fault A nice Tone King Imperial Mk1  ( http://www.toneking.com )arrived with a strange fault. When you turned up the reverb control there was this horrible buzzing sound which increased as you tried to increase the wetness of the reverb. Faults like this are usually the reverb cables, plug and sockets not being earned correctly or even a faulty reverb pan. Not this one! Read on ….. Background on the Tone King Imperial Amp Mk1 and
A two rock Gainmaster 35 arrived for a service. It is manufactured by the Premier Builders Guild LLC.  A fancy name! The amps are made in California and are around £2000..  They are built on a printed circuit style board which looks very like tagboard . See in the picture below. This amp is extremely well made and is a relatively simple straightforward design having two pre-amp valves, one phase splitter driving the two 6L6GC
A Laney VH100R amp head came in for a service. Â While “nothing” was wrong with it, the owner decided just to have its health checked out. This is a really high gain amp with 6 ECC83/12AX7 pre-amp valves driving 4x EL34B to give a 100 watts out. On switch on it was clear that a couple of the pre-amp valves had gone microphonic and the bases of the EL34B were all burnt. A sign of
I received an Orange Tiny Terror for repair. It had lost its voice ! I had never worked one of these amps so an exciting new experience. It is built into a nice metal case and is a very conventional circuit using two ECC83’s and two EL84’s in the output. Here is a picture of the amp opened up and the picture below shows the printed circuit board construction. I found it quite funny to
A very sick Mesa Boogie Caliber DC 10 amp arrived for me to have a look at. Our first Mesa Boogie Amp repair. Â This one had one dead channel and my 22 watt Fender Deluxe was as loud as this amp. Â The Mesa Boogie is a 100 watt amp so something was up. Â It also sounded naff. Mesa’s have a reputation of being complex and difficult to repair. Â I had never seen inside one but