well, that didn't go too badly at all (aside from a bit of initial awkwardness and shouts of "...turn that d_____ thing down, ce!"). the practice this afternoon helped me dial in pretty rapidly, and after about three songs I didn't touch any pot knobs but the ones on my 335 for the rest of my show. all in all, most of the guys commented quite favorably on the new rig ...the only comments that were in any sense negative were that I was using "too much club" (like swatting flies with a cannon, that sucka IS LOUD.....I stayed in the Overdrive channel and used the footswitch to control the OD "in" for solo-improv work and "out" for rhythm parts....the one downer is that I had to use an outboard reverb and I really missed that incredibly lush 'verb on both channels of the GA30 RV Super Goldtone, but I lacked NOT for excellent tone and drive when I lit those '60s British Westinghouse NOS 6L6's. I set the master volume on ~8.5 (of 10) and couldn't crack the gain pot past 2 without shaking the building and scaring the serious drinkers....but, ya know at 60, I got over the need to dime my amp many moons ago.
this afternoon I was able to put a little analysis and measurement time into the Goldtone and found some very squirrelly things. The B+ is fine past the rectifier, it feeds the output xfmr and Grid 2 with the correct dc voltages, the heaters are all nominal, but after that everything goes nuts. the filter section outputs 6 lesser source voltages (H1 thru H2) that feed the preamp tubes ECC83s (5) and ECC81s (2) plates. the R-C stages in the filter section drops the B+ (is supposed to drop the B+) from 341 vdc on the PI (V7) to 323 vdc on the ECC81 running the reverb transformer, and the same on (V6) for the reverb return (V5), to 311 vdc for V4 (FX Loop, the other ECC81), to the 3 ECC83s in the two preamps (V3, V2 and V1) which has the voltage successively dropping 302 vdc, 288 vdc and 275 vdc....at least that is what is supposed to happen. however, every voltage coming out of the filter section H1-H6 is but a few volts lower than the grid 2 voltage at 362 vdc.
there are two seemingly screwed up resisitors after the G2 feeder that decouple the 0volt bus from the B+.
Uh, "Default," in answer to your question about the tube sockets: they attach physically to the body of the chassis and have copper tabs that span the ~3/4" to the PCB, through which these tabs insert and then are soldered into place. they are not like the PCBs of Musicman amps at all, I got pretty good at making repairs and mods to Musicman PCBs ...these Trace Elliot boards are just scary! they are of obviously fine materials and the workmanship (artificial intelligence obviously assembled these PCBs and humans provided the oversight, inspection/quality control) is excellent....I'm positive I could work on the boards without those infernal tube sockets.... the traces are all quite thick, they don't appear at all fragile.....it's just, I HATE WORKING ON PCBs and SOLIDSTATE.....grrrrrrr. as much as I love the tone of this amp I think my only sane course of action is to get it working again and unload the puppy on someone with a more, uh..... modern outlook on technological "progress" (how was that for diplomatic phrasing?)
ce
