I'm sure it's the amp, I've swapped the speaker connections, and changed the input from phono to DAC. The left channel is definitely dead. There was no abuse here, it just died, and I'm sad. Hopefully it's a fuse, but that leaves the question as to what tripped the fuse in the first place. Now I'm listening in mono using the biwire of the right channel to drive my left speaker. Fortunately I have a mono switch, and a lot of mono records that I love, but this is going to end up costing me!
It would surprise me if it's one of the fuses. I haven't typically seen individual fuse for left and right channel. I would be more inclined to guess one of the tubes
Agree.. a search of this site shows similar issues being a bad tube. try switching the input tubes and see if the problem switches sides..
Are the tubes dedicated to particular channels? Because I have a new set of tubes that I wanted to swap in eventually anyway.
Well truth be told there was an intermittent noise on the now dead channel for some time. I swapped the caps for new ones, and the noise would still pop in from time to time, and then disappeared altogether. About a month after that the channel was dead. The noise was like a frequency doubled line noise.
All of these symptoms sound like tubes going... I think you have an excuse to swap tubes Typically yes. Tubes are per channel However dual triodes can power both depending on how they are implemented
Standard procedure with tube gear to suspect a tube when anything goes wrong. Troubleshoot by replacing tubes until problem is fixed.
Well that was easy One does need a rather small torx wrench (8) which is not standard in most sets, but having that I managed to swap tubes over lunch. One thing I noticed is that the vendor who had told me he replaced all the tubes had only actually replaced the center tube, which means it makes more sense that one of the older ones had gone. So long story short swapped all three tubes for the balanced JJ electronic E83CC's I already had, and Bob's your uncle, I'm back to two channels Thanks all, enjoying Killing Floor (Howlin' Wolf) then headed back to work!
Since you had a spare set of tubes and tubes are the most common thing to go south, I'm not sure why you didn't just change them to begin with.
Well in retrospect this seems to make a good deal of sense, however I actually never even considered the tubes, because other than listening to things with tubes, I'm a tube noob.
Lesson learned then. The thing is though, small signal tubes should last a very long time. Lots of vintage tube amps from the 60s are still operating just fine with their original tubes. These new tubes,
Understandable. Back when I still used tubes I always had a spare set ready to go, not so much because of a problem but the old ones would time-out. Always followed the manufactures replacement times to avoid bigger problems, it can really creep up on one if you listen to a lot of music. My Audio Research Ref3 preamp required new tubes once per year as to the manuals specs. Luckily it had an hour meter.
Hopefully not some deeper problem killing my tubes....Guess I'll know soon enough, the suspect tube is probably 10 years old.
Yeah I bought those with the idea that if something went bad with a tube, I would be ready to swap without any down time. Funny how when something did go bad with the tube it didn't even occur to me! Guess I should grab a few more, maybe something different, these were suggested in a thread by @rockin_since_58
Holy cow 10 years ??? Surprised you didn't have a catastrophic problem. Sometimes when tubes go bad they can really go bad. I try and avoid those issues.