Hey all, I think my Blue Angel may need to be re-capped.
I'm not sure of course but the amp is roughly 20 years old and it started having problems (read below for a description).
What bothers me is the cost of Atom caps! Why, oh why do these things cost $15-20 and availability of 30 uF is so scarce? This amp needs 8 of the bloody things!!
The problem:
I'll try to spare all the details, but I'm experiencing an intermittent drop in volume. It could be tubes but I have tried different rectifier and power tubes and even brought the amp to a tech. He only saw an arcing at the power switch which caused a resistor to cook, thus affecting its value so he replaced it along with a nearby diode. He ran the amp all day and volume never faded out.
I don't know for sure that he's a really good tech, but he didn't find anything else necessarily except to point out that I have low gain on my RCA 6V6s and I shouldn't use a 5Y3. I thought I was getting more sag out of it vs a GZ34 but read somewhere that Class A amps do not get affected by rectifier sag?
At the moment I am not sure if the problem is gone yet because it's intermittent and I have only had a couple hours on the amp. Note that I live in Canada so there's no way I'm going to send it back to Mesa.
Anyway, would love your input guys, even if it's to source cheaper filter caps! Thx
I'm not sure of course but the amp is roughly 20 years old and it started having problems (read below for a description).
What bothers me is the cost of Atom caps! Why, oh why do these things cost $15-20 and availability of 30 uF is so scarce? This amp needs 8 of the bloody things!!
The problem:
I'll try to spare all the details, but I'm experiencing an intermittent drop in volume. It could be tubes but I have tried different rectifier and power tubes and even brought the amp to a tech. He only saw an arcing at the power switch which caused a resistor to cook, thus affecting its value so he replaced it along with a nearby diode. He ran the amp all day and volume never faded out.
I don't know for sure that he's a really good tech, but he didn't find anything else necessarily except to point out that I have low gain on my RCA 6V6s and I shouldn't use a 5Y3. I thought I was getting more sag out of it vs a GZ34 but read somewhere that Class A amps do not get affected by rectifier sag?
At the moment I am not sure if the problem is gone yet because it's intermittent and I have only had a couple hours on the amp. Note that I live in Canada so there's no way I'm going to send it back to Mesa.
Anyway, would love your input guys, even if it's to source cheaper filter caps! Thx
