My box from Ted Weber showed up yesterday (speaker, replacement capacitors, fuses, light bulb), but my tubes from Antique Electronic Supply aren't supposed to show up until Monday. I got impatient, went to a local repair place, Audio Pro (where they seem to know well what they are doing) and got a cheap trio of tubes (two are used, one is a cheap Chinese tube) so I could see what, if anything, happened when I powered it up.
To my amazement -- it worked! I plugged in my guitar, played a chord, and sound came out! It even sounded like a guitar!
The tone controls work, the volume knob works, neither is very scratchy (they're a little scratchy), and at low volume it sounds nice. At high volume it sounds not so nice, but then I haven't started replacing any capacitors yet.
I was a little worried about the tubes, because last night (pre-tube) I plugged it in and measured the voltage coming off of the power transformer. According to the specs it should be putting out 660V, but I was reading 780V, and the 6.3V was reading 6.8V. I was concerned that I'd burn up the tubes. Both the proprietor at Audio Pro and my friend who knows about this stuff tell me that being 15-20% high on the voltage isn't much (or necessarily anything) to worry about. I might still replace the power transformer with one from Weber (for $35), but I'm in no immediate rush (especially now that I have a spare set of tubes).
No comments:
Post a Comment