Are Amps With Printed Boards Harder To Fix?

A twin is a great amp. Stellar clean tones with tons of volume. Just bear in mind that if you want crunch you're going to have to have the pedals to get it.
A twin with the right pedals is as good as it gets in terms of a gigging amp.

You can get almost any kind of distortion and crunch in a pedal but a killer clean tone is either there or it isn't
Its defiantly there on a twin
 
jimistone said:
A twin is a great amp. Stellar clean tones with tons of volume. Just bear in mind that if you want crunch you're going to have to have the pedals to get it.
A twin with the right pedals is as good as it gets in terms of a gigging amp.

You can get almost any kind of distortion and crunch in a pedal but a killer clean tone is either there or it isn't
Its defiantly there on a twin
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I have another amp that gets good crunch, it just doesn't have much clean headroom.
 
Agree with jimistone about this. The Twin is the standard as for as clean tones go. I have an old Tele and Twin for just such tones. But then again, so does thousands and thousands of others! LOL! I believe Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Peter Green, all played on Twins before switching to Marshalls. It's the standard in the country genre. Throw a distortion pedal in there and you can play in any genre. And they are LOUD! LOL!
 
So what's as clean as the Twin but without that much power? I don't think you need that much to have enough headroom for clean.
 
jimistone said:
A twin is a great amp. Stellar clean tones with tons of volume. Just bear in mind that if you want crunch you're going to have to have the pedals to get it.
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That's not entirely true. A twin will crunch it's ass off when your turn it up. Check out Johnny Thunders.
 
Greg_L said:
That's not entirely true. A twin will crunch it's ass off when your turn it up. Check out Johnny Thunders.
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Yeah, if you crank the volume all the way up it breaks up a bit, but most people don't have a place or gig where they can use that kind of volume. I was talking about it not having a pre gain for getting crunch at a lower volume.

Ted nugent got a lot of crunch out of twins in the 1970's...
He made a lot of people's ears bleed too
 
Ok, quick retard question-

I want to test the trem and reverb on this Twin, and the guy doesn't have the footswitch. I DO have a synth sustain pedal with a 1/4" mono plug and also a 1/4"-RCA adapter. I know the sustain pedal is momentary and not latching, but if I keep my foot on it, will it work with the adapter to test what I want real quick?
 
Fixable PCB Amps

Greg_L said:
I'm regret to inform you that your tech is a hack or just lazy. Find a different one. PCBs started showing up in amps in the very early 70s. Maybe late 60s even? They're fixable.
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You are certainly correct in that they are fixable. When they 1st came out, they were usually the low price range amps and considered "DISPOSABLE" like the other commenter said, "Spend $75.00 to repair an $80.00 DVD player. Not so today as there are super units produced today.
 
fat_fleet said:
You're pretty much confirming what I think here, though it's not really a crackle and I tried to leave out specific details about the actual problem in the original post to avoid any kind of diagnostic discussion.

But as long as we're here, it's more of a low distorted buzz that's always the same volume (doesn't swell with the note). Sounds almost like a speaker coil rattling away, but I know it's not speaker related. It might not even be audible with louder, more overdriven guitar parts..but I use this amp mostly for cleans and keep it below the point of breaking up. The tech actually replaced a lot of the tone stack and called me saying it was "mostly" fixed, but I went down and plugged in, it just sounded the same to me. I actually had to turn the amp down to point out the sound. I think it would still be a good amp for someone else, but it's just not cutting it for me any more.
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it's more of a low distorted buzz that's always the same volume

could be 60 cycle hum, usually poor filtering by the filter caps in the power supply. Just redid my 68 super reverb with the same problem, replaced the filter caps and voila. Sometimes when I play out I have that problem in certain venues. I don't know what causes it but when I lift the ground by using a two prong adapter on my plug it will go away.
 
jimistone said:
Yeah, if you crank the volume all the way up it breaks up a bit, but most people don't have a place or gig where they can use that kind of volume. I was talking about it not having a pre gain for getting crunch at a lower volume.

Ted nugent got a lot of crunch out of twins in the 1970's...
He made a lot of people's ears bleed too
Click to expand...

great thing about the old fenders like my super. Turn all the tone controls down, turn up the volume, then turn up the tone controls, works almost like a master volume. Ask anyone who was at the CT jamfests about my super. I was asked a few times what pedals I was using, I was using none.
 
fat_fleet said:
....... .it's more of a low distorted buzz that's always the same volume (doesn't swell with the note). Sounds almost like a speaker coil rattling away, but I know it's not speaker related. It might not even be audible with louder, more overdriven guitar parts......
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Bad 6L6, or the bias is way off. A weird thing I've seen a few times; it can be hardware rattle. Tighten everything on the amp, and try again. Then it's the 6L6 problem. Russian 6L6's can be problematic, and inconsistent.
 
Totally Repairable! It is a little more work and you have to have some talent for removing components without butchering the PCB. I fixed the same amp last week for a customer. He wanted the input jacks converted to wired type instead of PCB mount. The logic was the originals are cheap production types and fail prematurely. Fender came out with a high durability PCB mount jack which I installed and happy with the result.

Regarding capacitor failures, they are rare for non electrolytic, but the electrolytic caps usually show signs of bulging or leaking or running hot if they see too much AC ripple. Also time is a big factor, I rebuild old Bogens for guitar amps and I always recap everything due to age.

Good luck!
 
Any chance of a 10 second clip of the noise?

Filter caps DO fail but not nearly as often a people think. I came back to guitar amps 6yrs ago after a lifetime in domestic electronics and 10 years industrial. In those 6 years I NEVER had to change ANY capacitors except a 220mfd 450V that had been fitted the wrong polarity.

There was even a 10mfd 350V cap that got nearly 500V on it due to a control loop fault and that only swelled up a bit, did not fail!

In any event, poor HT filtering would give a 120Hz buzz (I doubt you would hear much 60Hz via a guitar speaker!)

PCBs are ok to work on if you have the experience and skill. Turret "hand wired" is fine but it is hard to make it look as good as factory gate state.

The faults I saw in those six years were:---

Valves!!! Number One problem!
Pots, noisy but mainly in pedals where I guess they get a lot of crap in them.
Resistors gone high or noisy (ccomp Rs in "boutique" amps) V, V,V, rare, say once every 6 months?

And second only to valves? Bits broken, mainly jacks, switch toggles and impedance selectors and this is NOT because the components were of low quality! Guitarists are brutes! Oh! And transformer failure was virtually non-existent (that is, the odd one failed but due to other causes)

Greg is right. The guy is a know nothing lazy clod.
Fergot, Foil, i.e. non-electrolytic caps? Narny a one.

Dave.
 
A cap doesn't have to fail though to be bad, does it? Lots of bad caps in amps still work, they just don't sound good.
 
Greg_L said:
A cap doesn't have to fail though to be bad, does it? Lots of bad caps in amps still work, they just don't sound good.
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Not completely true. A capacitor that 'doesn't work' stops blocking DC (for coupling capacitors) or doesn't filter (for filter capacitors). For a coupling capacitor, if it's leaky you get a little DC passing through. This throws off the bias on preamp tubes, and you can get distortion or sometimes it sounds like 'farting' on top of those low notes. I've seen it where the volume controls seems very scratchy, and no matter how many times you clean the potentiometer, it seems scratchy. Changing the coupling capacitor fixed the problem. That capacitor tester I pointed out works amazing at finding these capacitors, but it's work using the tester. Filter capacitors that have a high ESR don't filter ripple completely. You may get what sounds like 'ghost notes' or a bad ring modulator.
I guess if you look at it as a capacitor that isn't a dead short still works, then 'yeah, it works but sounds bad' is one way to look at it. But the capacitor doesn't have a sound itself, it's causing the sound to be bad, by throwing off the bias or allowing ripple to pass through.
 
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