Time to test out MESA Customer Service

[some_dude]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

They still are glowing and look OK. Amp comes on, etc. But when I crank the volume I get the light show :shrug: sigh....

Forgot to mention too that you can "hear" the amp when I crank the master above 12 oclock...just not through the speaker...if you put your ear to the top of the combo you can hear the gain...like someone wasn't wearing their headphones and they were really far away and you could kinda hear something

Also, I was smart enough to check to make sure the speaker mute switch wasn't on

Is your speaker plugged in? Because if your power tubes are lighting up, and you can hear your axe through them (kinda neat, isn't it?), then your signals making it atleast that far.....

 

[FretFire]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

Perhaps the speaker cable is going bad, which could be giving the power section some strain and could result in the light show? (just grasping at straws here)

 

[JeffB]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

Is your speaker plugged in? Because if your power tubes are lighting up, and you can hear your axe through them (kinda neat, isn't it?), then your signals making it atleast that far.....

SD,
I made sure the speaker was plugged in, and even plugged it into the other inputs just to see if it was the jack. Perhaps it's the speaker wire/speaker itself as FF mentioned..

But why would that make the tubes go ballistic?

 

[some_dude]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

SD,
I made sure the speaker was plugged in, and even plugged it into the other inputs just to see if it was the jack. Perhaps it's the speaker wire/speaker itself as FF mentioned..

But why would that make the tubes go ballistic?

How ballistic are we talking?

I've driven my amp pretty hard into a dummy load, and since there's no speaker noise when playing that way you can hear all the electricity just flying around the tubes....when nothing is going through the amp it sounds like white noise, but when you play something the white noise modulates and sounds just like what you're playing, except it sounds like what you'd hear through someone elses headphones.....that's why after reading your description I thought your speakers might have been disconnected.

 

[FretFire]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

Well, it's pretty bad for your amp to be turned on and not connected to a speaker or some other sort of load, that's why I was wondering if perhaps the cable was shot and the signal was getting held up somewhere could make the power section act up a bit... again that's just a shot in the dark, I'm certainly no expert.

 

[diatribe]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

JEFFB,
I just retubed my dual rectifier with kt88's, gz34 rectifier's, and a high gain ecc83 front end, all from jj/eurotubes.

After retubing and playing for about 1-3 hours i had a light show in the back of my amp, and i was scared! The amp stopped making sound, and eventually blew a fuse and conFUSEd me.

I talked to bob(from eurotubes) and he told my to take my power tube's out and run two at a time in the outer most or inner most sockets and i would narrow my problem down to the problem tube, and it worked like a gem.

He sent me a replacement for free and it worked wonders. i am back in my high gain bliss.

He also said that you can run 2 power tubes that work in either set of sockets and the amp would work fine, though it will reduce the volume by about 3 dec. and drop the ohm load coming out of your amp in half *ex. 16 ohm load output with 4 tubes=8 ohm load output with 2 tubes(output tubes are 6l6, el34, or in my case kt88's)

when doing this keep close to the standby switch so you don't punish your amp to much and just wait for the bad tube to put on a light show in the comfort of your own home.

DJM

 

[FretFire]

Re: Time to test out MESA Customer Service

Bob is a very helpful guy, even if you aren't sending any money his way, he loves to talk tubes...