first time in about 15 years!
LOL

man did it stink.
i kept smelling something like burning plastic....

and finally i snuck a peak behind the amp head, and it was redplating!


LOL again.......

it was hot as hell, hadn't completely given up the ghost, but was already in the death throes.

i was recording..... and had the amp jacked to about 50% power, with an attenuator in line....
i should have been running the fan, but i wasn't.

 
i kept thinking to myself "amp sounds like @ss tonight, wazzup?"
and then the smell was the giveaway.



i gotta say, the mesa branded tubes, have been very good to me.
i've never tubed with ANYTHING but mesa tubes, and over the last 32 years, tube wear has been phenomenal.

ok, off to buy tubes at lunch today......

Ahh man that stinks or sux, which ever way ya wanna look at it LOL

yes, it stinksucks



but i haven't retubed in several years, guess i gotta pony up

got my new ones.
firing em up soon...

I can't remember the last time I fried a tube either.  Has to have been a good 15-20 years ago.  

I fried an electrolytic capacitor (inserted wrong way <doh>) fixing a video monitor last year.

I'd forgotten what an unholy stench (and BANG!) they make

I still have the original tubes in my 100 Watt Mesa Dual Rectifier Tremoverb 2 x 12 combo. Still sounds awesome and I used to play out with it.

I got it in the mid 90's iirc.

Most of the tubes I fried were in the project amps I built. Bias set wrong by a few volts. I start playing and it's sounding good, all is fine at the low volume..... crank it and shortly the tubes look like light bulbs and the sound is distorted...... the fuse kicks out and smoke is coming from the amp..... tubes were fried..... 


I think I fried one tube is a factory amp... a Carvin. But, the envelope had a crack in it and O2 was getting in there.  A 2 tube power section doesn't run well on one tube. No spare in the gig bag...so I had to run all the way to town on a Friday night to find a tube.... that was luck that I actually found one. 

I blew one out of a linear amp once...just once...a 4CX1000A...stink city...eeewwwww...

Mesa are usually biased to run "cold". They don't red plate very often. The factory bias settings allow for a wide range of plug and play possibility.

I've seen power tubes do some weird things but I have rarely seen one red plate without some issue elsewhere in the circuit being part the cause.

If this new set of tubes burns down in the next couple of weeks you may want to measure the bias current and determine if the bias supply has aged to a point of deterioration.

It may have just been a tube dying all by itself... or the tube may have been killed by a bias supply issue that has yet to be diagnosed.

Or it could be the Palmer has finally started frying the output transformer and the tubes are displaying the symptom.


Keep an eye on it.


best regards,
mike