DSL401

nick79

In my ever ongoing quest to find a decent 'do it all' amp now i've actually joined a band i'm looking at DSL401's. Had one years ago but only gigged it once before a change of circumstances ended my guitar playing for a bit. 

I seem to remember it sounding pretty good, and i do like the sound of a Marshall. I've heard some horror stories about reliability, so i'm a bit cautious. There is one for sale locally at £280 - Worth a punt do you reckon? 

The new DSL40c has caught my attention too, but i've no idea if they are better built, although i did play through one today and loved it. But then i'm looking at more money. Has anyone here played both and can offer an opinion? 

Thanks

dilbert

@ICBM will be along shortly to give an expert opinion but I know the 401's did suffer from overheating in the early days. The good news?. There is a modification that will cure it.

The ones I have heard have actually sounded pretty decent. This guy makes one sound decent too

ICBM

There are a couple of improvements you can make to the 401 which will drastically improve reliability. Adding a fan is *not* one of them though - it's the heat inside the chassis which is the problem, not from the valves.

The important ones are:

Fit the filament bridge rectifier with a heatsink.

Add safety resistors across the master volume pot to prevent loss of bias voltage.

Bias the valves cooler.

Add some spacers to increase the gap at the top rear of the chassis.

I also prefer to remove the push-connectors from the speaker cable and solder the wires, since I've seen a couple fail. It's best to change the speaker *before* doing this, if you're going to .

If you do all that - none of which are huge jobs - then it's actually quite a decent and reliable amp.

One further problem is that earlier examples had power valve cutouts in the chassis that were slightly too small to take all brands of EL84. I wish I was making stuff up like this but I'm really not .

nick79

Thanks chaps. 

@ICBM, how much do you reckon it would cost me to get a repair guy to do the mods for me? Don't suppose you are local to Worcester are you?

ICBM

nick79 said:

@ICBM, how much do you reckon it would cost me to get a repair guy to do the mods for me? Don't suppose you are local to Worcester are you?

Not since 1985 unfortunately!

It should be around £50 or a little more to do all that I think, as long as the tech is fairly familiar with what to do so there isn't a lot of investigation time and they can do it all at once. Basically about an hour's work at whatever rate they charge plus a few small parts.

nick79

Thats great, thanks very much. Do you know if the same issues plague the 40c? 

zepp76

I haven't owned or tried a 401 but I do own a DSL40C and love it. The only let down is that you can't use the foot control to switch between clean and crunch channels, I get around this by using an Xotic SL Drive pedal so I basically have clean, crunch and ultra gain channels at my feet.

ICBM

nick79 said:

Thats great, thanks very much. Do you know if the same issues plague the 40c? 

No, I don't know - the most I can say is that I haven't seen a 40C for repair yet! So it is possible it's been improved.

jpfamps

I've only seen one 40c for repair, although I can't remember of the top of my head what the problem was.

I think it was either a valve or a fuse; nothing serious.

The 40c uses 2 x EL34 so will be less likely to suffer power valve failure.

Also the power valves are chassis mounted rather than on a PCB which is a better arrangement.

Bod

The 40c sounds infinitely better than the 401 IMO

ICBM

jpfamps said:

The 40c uses 2 x EL34 so will be less likely to suffer power valve failure.

Also the power valves are chassis mounted rather than on a PCB which is a better arrangement.

Maybe the warranty department has had a word with R&D and Accounts.

nick79

Thanks guys, think i'll go for a 40c unless a 401 comes up locally silly cheap. 

CHrisP86

I've been thinking about getting a DSL of some sort as well.

Out of interest, are the heads worse on the reliability front or are the potential issues similar to the combos?

ICBM

The older heads have a different set of faults from the combos, and are maybe slightly worse. Not sure about the new ones, I haven't seen any for repair yet either. Which may be a good sign...

jpfamps

ICBM said:

The older heads have a different set of faults from the combos, and are maybe slightly worse. Not sure about the new ones, I haven't seen any for repair yet either. Which may be a good sign...

The new one's are much better built and don't have any of the faults of the older DSL heads (other than the sound).

The power valves are also chassis mount as well, which is a great improvement.

ICBM

jpfamps said:

The new one's are much better built and don't have any of the faults of the older DSL heads (other than the sound).

The power valves are also chassis mount as well, which is a great improvement.

Wow. They really have been paying attention. Who would have thought? First they dropped all the fan-cooled crap, then they went back from MDF to ply for the 1936 cabs, and now this…

Anyone would think their internet reputation is finally catching up with them .

Have you spotted any Doh! faults like the switch in the 16-ohm jack on the old ones?