Where’s Lancpudin?

Hey Otto, you can't just go around telling people you were hammering on a billion dollar submarine. You have to be more technical than that. So you call that hammer a "gross percussion instrument". THEN you can hammer away with it to your hearts content.

 

This afternoon started out with a plan to do some guitar playing. It seems my amp has different ideas. Something is badly amiss. It's behaving like a 6 cylinder engine running on just two cylinders. Little volume with much distortion.

As you all may recall I pulled all the tubes and cleaned the pins and sockets last Sunday and following that it was working four square and had earlier in the week but now I'm back in the weeds again and don't know what's causing it.

I'd like to think it may be as simple as a bad tube but the little devils are all glowing nice and bright and their big brothers as well. Guess I can start by replacing the three little guys one at a time to see if it's the preamp, phase inverter, or the effects loop. If that's not solving anything I do have a spare pair of power tubes I can swap in as well so at least I can trouble shoot that way.

If anything goes beyond that I'm gonna have to take it to an amp tech and believe it or not there aren't all that many around here. I know who I'd trust most but I don't know if he's doing repairs any longer vs building custom amp modules for sale. I guess a phone call to him can get that question answered.

If any of you are amp wizards and have a thought or two to input please fire away. As good as I may be doing most of my own guitar work an amp guru I am not. Wish me luck.

 

Fortunately I'm just lazy enough to have saved myself a lot of time.

Before I began my journey of diagnosing and hopefully repairing my amp issue I sat and pondered over things I had done last Sunday when hooking everything back up.

My not fully senile so far brain seemed to recall a brief issue with the effects pedals and the effects loop. I chalked that up to possibly having reversed the send and return or not having one cable pushed in tight but the problem went away so I assumed all was good. But......maybe not. Hmmmmmm.......

So in order; I ran straight into the input with no pedals or effects run through the effects loop. Bam.....works as it should. Next came running through just the tuner, compressor, and clean boost. Bam two.....works as it should. Step three added all of the overdrive pedal. Bam three.....all working at 100% w/full volume.

Ah ha.....it's in the effects loop eh, you sneaky little bastiche. Plug that pedal board in and zip. Ok is it; A) the tube in V2, or B) the cables. The tube is a new Tung-Sol glowing bright orange and 12AX7 rarely fail without some sign or they go microphonic first. It's not that. Swapped the cables with two new ones I bought just for that purpose but hadn't used yet. Voila'. It all works again.

$900 worth of amp/speakers and about $1200 worth of pedals, pedal boards, power supplies, and cabling all brought down by one lousy $5 cable. Sheesh!

 

Nice work on tracing the fault soulmann You've gotta love outcome is just a new lead . After watching the trailer for the new Matrix 4 film I think I'll dust off the bluray player & watch the Matrix boxset again with the surround speakers blasting

 

I shoulda just replaced those cables last Sunday Ian. After all, it is what I bought them for. But like so many other things in our lives we get in a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality and at times we fail to use the old "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" approach instead.

Anyway, I'm glad to have found the issue as quickly as I did just by trying the old "process of elimination" approach. There are times when I do believe we've gotten so damn technical and have so many devices that use more advanced technology that our lives have become dependent upon this.

Compared to having a multi-effects unit my signal path may seem quite over complicated but at least it's using old school technology that can be troubleshot and fixed by my old school brain and technical skills.

Hope you enjoy the Matrix. Some days I feel we're living in one too.

 

PC Plod takes a dim view o that here My Mam has a really good LG tv, the picture quality is out of this world compared to our Panasonic tv, She forgets which remote is which & cant get the picture to come on at times so I'm constantly popping over to sort it out. A nature program came on when I got the picture on & it was in ultra HD or something & the picture quality was out of this world.

Looks like a bread making day today as we've no bread in the bread bin to make a black pudn & tomato butty for breakfast.

 

Spent a very enjoyable day with my daughters family yesterday. The weather was incredible. It was a little cooler north of here in Ft Collins and they live on the edge of the city so there was a terrific breeze blowing keeping it comfortable.

We grilled burgers and hot dogs and Tom (son-in-law) and I took in some college football games in between chasing a four year old and a one year old around keeping them entertained while my daughter went to the store for the fixins'.

The kids are such a hoot. Rory babbles even more now and wanders all over the house looking for something to get into. She's walking quite well and now waves hi any bye and throws kisses. She also likes to crawl up on my lap and play with my beard. She's very social and likes to share her food or snacks with grandpa.

Rylan now realizes that she has to share Mommy and Daddy attention with her baby sis so when I'm around she'll grab me so she can have someone all to herself in between her fixation on the cartoons on her iPad. Paw Pals is a favorite and today it was sing along songs. She's still goofy as ever but also very pouty when she wants to get her way. It's an act and she knows it too.

Nearly four and already practicing to become a master manipulator......LOL.

It's so nice to get away for a few hours once a month to spend time with family.

 

That's surprising. I don't think we used the speakers on our old one long enough to break them in and it's the same on the new one. Probably just long enough to turn them off. Sound goes through our "ancient" (built in '02, bought in '04) surround system via optical lines.

As for a Blu-Ray player, I like our Panasonic UB420-K.
I haven't used it for an UHD 4K disc yet (just bought one) but the upscaling on DVD and regular Blu-ray is pretty sweet.

 

Still digging my Sony 43” 4K, but like @Raiyn, I run the sound through a nearly same vintage Yamaha 5.1 surround system, with Polk Audio fronts, a Cambridge Soundworks center, Sony bookshelf speakers for the surround, and a powered Pioneer sub.

 

Mine isn't too fancy. It's a "650W" RCA Home Theater in a Box which consists of an receiver / amplifier, a set of 5.1 speakers and a passive sub. I've got it hooked up with RadioShack "lamp cord" speaker cord (12 AWG IIRC) and up until the shift to HDMI a plethora of RadioShack A/V cables of various flavors. These days I use a Monoprice Blackbird 4K HDMI Switch <snip> Toslink and Analog Audio Extractor to feed the optical system on the 2nd input. The primary optical in is reserved for the cable box as it's the only way I can get true Dolby Digital Surround off the TV signal. Everything else goes in the 2nd optical input. Game systems, BluRay etc.

I get my A/V cables from Monoprice along with most of my other cable needs.

 

And here I watch videos on my latptop wearing headphones. Ah hell, I wouldn't have room for a big screen in this place anyway. Too much music gear.

 

That's what happened to my Aiwa "dorm blaster" bookshelf system from my bachelor days. It ended up in the garage. The CD changer carousel gave up years ago, but I can still plug into the AUX input and play stuff off my phone and listen to the radio, so that works out. Hell, I think the tape decks still work too.

I've got that same style of 3.5mm to RCA cable for my surround sound too, which is great for music.

Having said that, and perhaps I'm odd, on game day I prefer the phone + speaker setup. Partly because it more closely reminds me of listening to the games on the old portable radios I had growing up (same station too - gotta love the internet), and mostly because these days my brother and I text each other during games now.

 

Except for the speakers, I still have my first “high end” stereo set up. And it all still works, mostly. The light that lit up the tuner bar on my 1977 Yamaha CR220 doesn’t light up, and a few lights on the 1995 Yamaha Dolby Pro Surround don’t light up, but the 1983 Marantz CD player still opens and plays, although it creaks going in and out. The Sansui 5 CD changer still works, and with fixing, my Technics and Sansui turntables from 1977 and 1980 respectively still would work nicely.