Why my Peavey Classic 30 kept dying

This is among many reasons why I haven't updated this blog in a while. My amp (Peavey Classic 30 Combo) occasionally started cutting out after a while. A slow fade out to nothing. My first thought was 'that pint of cider that fell on it a few months back'. But after looking inside I don't think liquid damage was the problem.

So I bought a matched set of valves from Hotrox UK . They worked for a bit, sounded ok, but ran a lot hotter and eventually the same problem returned. So then I took it to a tech, who left it on a dummy load for two days and found no problem.

So, I brought it back home, and set out again to look inside, as this had to be a thermal and mechanical problem. I think I got to the bottom of it:

Can't see it? Neither could I. Inside the amp the pcb is in 3 parts, kept together by a vast number of jumpers. Turns out one of them had come loose:

It took about 3 hours to get the amp apart, and two minutes to fix. So far no problems, fingers crossed. 

Mix and match your tubes

As much as I liked the matched valves, they seemed to amplify their character by all being the same, so the clean and OD channels seemed very similar, despite having different gain. I much preferred the stock valves for the clean channel, but the new valves for the OD channel. The power tubes didn't really make a difference although I think the matched ones were a bit quieter than stock when pushed. They definitely ran hotter.

At the moment I have all stock tubes with a matched valve in the OD slot (The middle preamp tube). I'm much happier with the OD sound now.

Back to pedal modding!