Yee Hah - BiasMaster arrived, 1 healthy Shiva again

welshboyo

Big thanks to @ICBM, @ecc83 and @jpfamps for their ever valuable wisdoms on all things amps..

Biasmaster arrived, was a little apprehensive with poking around inside a live amp but 1 hand in pocket and some peace and quiet to get on with it and I was fine..

The old Winged-C's were definitely shagged...well one at least - 1 valve was drawing 40ma on idle while the other (which looked a bit dodgy from the glow) was only drawing 12ma!! - this was probably the reason why I had lost all clean headroom....it also makes me wonder about the actual quality of these so called "premium valves"...

Chucked in a set of Ruby EL34BT's as recommended by Bogner and there was an instant improvement both were warm idling at 27ma (well with a few cents of each other) pleasanty surprised at how well matched they were...took it up to the Bogner 29ma spec

Gave a good playing for an hour or so at well over gig levels, got the amp really warm and re-checked the bias, all good, all volume and headroom returned, happy chappy..

Now the next challenge is do I sell it......

Chalky

IME premium meant better sound quality not better build quality.

welshboyo

yes @chalky I suppose you are right....but considering you pay a premium for these Winged-C's you'd expect them to last a little longer than 12 months....ok, fair enough this amp has done a lot of gigs and is probably hard on valves, but still...I've had other amps do the same amount of gigs on "lesser" valves with no issues..

certainly a case of paying for the name, rather than the quality...

Chalky

Yeah, sadly its a choice between reliability and sonic goodness! But well done for getting the Shiva working - we're lucky to have these kind helpful folks around us.