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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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.
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
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Edit - appears that they have guitar techs but not amp techs.
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
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Having said that most manufacturers would require the unit to be sent back to them for a warranty repair.
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
"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
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
And I do go to bass gigs on public transport.
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