Amps and repairability

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HAL9000HAL9000 Frets: 9550
edited January 2020 in Amps
My Blues Cube Stage recently started making some fluttery farty noises as the notes were dying away. Being only six months old (the amp that is, not me) I've taken it back to Andertons who in turn are sending it to Roland. Hopefully should have it back fairly shortly.

Anyway I did a bit of Googling to see if this a known issue (it doesn't seem to be) and came across this old thread...

https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/117469/roland-blues-cube-artist-kaput-and-irreparable/p1

...where repairability gets discussed at length. The upshot being that an amp (or anything else for that matter) costing north of £800 can't really be considered as 'disposable'. However Roland appeared to be unhelpful once things were out of warranty and the OP of that thread was fortunate not to have to throw away a fairly pricey amp.

I'm currently thinking that a small valve amp might be worth adding to the arsenal - particularly if the BC ends up being with Roland for any length of time. There seems to be a view that valve amps are more likely to be repairable should things go wrong but presumably a moderately-priced valve amp could still use PCBs etc that are exclusive to that amp and that may be/become difficult to obtain. And I guess that manufacturers are still going to be protective of their schematics etc. So... in the £500-£600 price range (roughly the cost of my BC Stage), are valve amps really likely to be more repairable? Or is this a 'Well, it says so on the internet' thing?


I play guitar because I enjoy it rather than because I’m any good at it
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Comments

  • longjawlongjaw Frets: 420
    edited January 2020
    A single channel, hand-wired valve amp is eminently repairable.

    Once you add channels and other features to valve amps PCB boards tend to be used and the difficulty of carrying out simple repairs becomes an issue.
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  • timhuliotimhulio Frets: 1286
    tFB Trader
    Have you thought about getting something vintage? I like Fender amps, so something like a silver face Musicmaster Bass amp or a Champ should be within budget. These are reliable, repairable and don't use PCBs.
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  • ecc83ecc83 Frets: 1589
    I find it sad, but not unexpected that a music store of Anderton's cache and size do not have any in house technical staff.

    If we don't start mending a hell of a lot of stuff very soon we are indeed doomed.

    Dave.
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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71951
    Even PCB valve amps are repairable fairly easily as long as they don't use surface-mount parts. Although you do need to know whether there are any specific nasty problems associated with a particular model, something like a Fender Hotrod is fine. The only real long-term problems are areas of the board cooking - or if you're unlucky, a major failure which actually burns part of it - but this can usually be repaired by cutting out and bridging over the damage. The worst case would be having to make a small hand-wired section to replace it - this is sometimes necessary with Blues Juniors when the power valve board catches fire!

    Complex modern amps with surface-mount parts means it's likely to be Game Over if the board suffers any damage. Changing the individual parts is possible if you have the tools and skills, but repairing the traces is getting to the point of being too difficult.

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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  • HAL9000HAL9000 Frets: 9550
    edited January 2020
    ecc83 said:
    I find it sad, but not unexpected that a music store of Anderton's cache and size do not have any in house technical staff.

    If we don't start mending a hell of a lot of stuff very soon we are indeed doomed.

    Dave.
    My understanding (but I stand to be corrected) is that Anderton’s does have technical people but that in this case they chose to send it back to Roland else there’s a danger of voiding the warranty.

    Edit - appears that they have guitar techs but not amp techs.
    I play guitar because I enjoy it rather than because I’m any good at it
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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71951
    HAL9000 said:

    My understanding (but I stand to be corrected) is that Anderton’s does have technical people but that in this case they chose to send it back to Roland else there’s a danger of voiding the warranty.
    I've come across a couple of Roland amps that were for practical purposes unrepairable because of the way they were made. The worst was a bass combo where the speakers and power supply were in the cabinet part of the enclosure, and the amp chassis in a separate section... between the two was a complex wiring loom passing through a hole in the cabinet. This had been thoroughly glued up and left so short that it was impossible to even get the chassis out far enough to do basic fault-finding, let alone work on it. The only way to get into it would have been to cut the wiring loom off on the cabinet side of the glue plug, then chop it through into the amp section and rebuild the whole loom afterwards.

    I declined the repair. If it had been under warranty I have no doubt that Roland would simply have replaced the amp.

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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  • jpfampsjpfamps Frets: 2723
    HAL9000 said:
    ecc83 said:
    I find it sad, but not unexpected that a music store of Anderton's cache and size do not have any in house technical staff.

    If we don't start mending a hell of a lot of stuff very soon we are indeed doomed.

    Dave.
    My understanding (but I stand to be corrected) is that Anderton’s does have technical people but that in this case they chose to send it back to Roland else there’s a danger of voiding the warranty.

    Edit - appears that they have guitar techs but not amp techs.
    I'm not sure Anderton's have amp techs (In fact I've fairly certain they don't based on my experience doing warranty repairs), although they do have guitar techs as far as I am aware.

    Having said that most manufacturers would require the unit to be sent back to them for a warranty repair.
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  • Danny1969Danny1969 Frets: 10356
    I think amp techs might become a thing of the past in shops to a certain extent. Unless of course manufactures make populated PCB's available  as a service part  .... which they should. On something like a Katana the actual PCB cost less to manufacture that the box and speaker .... probably less than the speaker!  

    As the years go by the good ol linear power supply is going to all but disappear meaning there will never really be any easy repairs to any amp other than a broken jack socket but then physical damage is never covered under warranty anyway. 

    I'm looking at a Mark Bass head as we speak, it's built internally like a computer SMPS with only half of it cooled properly, ceramic resistors hot glued to the heatsinks. For the sake of making it small they have really compromised the reliability and that seems to be with a lot of these bass heads I've seen recently from TC, Ashdown and Mark
    www.2020studios.co.uk 
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  • Modulus_AmpsModulus_Amps Frets: 2569
    tFB Trader
    If you want an amp that will last you need to know what you are getting and like ICBM says, stay away from surface mount parts

    Ironically we spend hundreds on laptops and electronic devices that we know will be out dated in a few months and need to be replaced in a few years.

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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71951
    Danny1969 said:

    I'm looking at a Mark Bass head as we speak, it's built internally like a computer SMPS with only half of it cooled properly, ceramic resistors hot glued to the heatsinks. For the sake of making it small they have really compromised the reliability and that seems to be with a lot of these bass heads I've seen recently from TC, Ashdown and Mark
    That's very disappointing... the earlier Mark stuff seems very reliable. TC and Ashdown I've never been very impressed with.

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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  • jpfampsjpfamps Frets: 2723
    ICBM said:
    Danny1969 said:

    I'm looking at a Mark Bass head as we speak, it's built internally like a computer SMPS with only half of it cooled properly, ceramic resistors hot glued to the heatsinks. For the sake of making it small they have really compromised the reliability and that seems to be with a lot of these bass heads I've seen recently from TC, Ashdown and Mark
    That's very disappointing... the earlier Mark stuff seems very reliable. TC and Ashdown I've never been very impressed with.
    I understand the appeal of Class D bass heads (in fact I use one myself), but below a certain weight is there really any point in trying to make it smaller and lighter given that you also have to bring a cab + bass to the gig.

    And I do go to bass gigs on public transport.
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  • Danny1969Danny1969 Frets: 10356
    This is more like it .... this is actually my own JMP-1 pre amp which suffered a transformer failure in the late summer last year which simply blew a fuse. Unfortunately a friend looked at it and replaced the fuse with the wrong rating ... very wrong rating which basically did some damage before that blew. 
    Despite a fair bit of damage it's actually easy to put right. The transformer was readily available despite being a low profile model and all the regulators, diodes  and caps are off the shelf components that are so common you would almost expect them to be on the shelf in B&Q ... certainly if Maplins were still in the game they would stock them. Of course being all through hole components helps a lot too. 
    While In bits I've modded it as it's always annoyed me that the input was one the front and not the back 



    Nothing else with a digital side will be this easy that's for sure 
    www.2020studios.co.uk 
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