Another Fender Hot Rod Deluxe arrived . This was one of the early ones in really nice physical condition dating from around 1998.  It was made in the USA. Alas, I only ever see sick ones. This one had about 0.2 watts out on full volume and totally distorted. The valves had not been changed in years and the output valves were original Sovtek 5881’s rebranded as Groove tubes. They were still kind of working […]
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 number of valve sellers offer output valves that are “burned in”. Burning in valves means basically running them for a number of hours. It is claimed that the benefit is that this weeds out the ” weak valves” and improves the matching of the valves as the implication is that the valves go out of matching if they are matched from new. I was suspicious of this claim as there is no data produced
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
We have introduced more new valves which are all now in stock. We now have the more specialised valves that are used in Ampeg and Peavey guitar amps. Â The Electro Harmonix 12DW7 ( also known as the ECC832) is a double triode and in this valve one half is like an ECC83 Â ( 12 AX7) with a gain of 100 Â and the other half like an ECC82 ( 12AU7) with a gain of 20. Peavey
Here is a short video under 2 minutes on 6L6 output valves and long plate versus short plate valves. This video shows something surprising about different 6L6 valves. A quick look a long plate and short plate ECC83 /12AX7 type valves is included too. Click here to watch on Youtube We started creating our Youtube channel only 2 weeks ago on 16th January 2016. Here is a link to the channel