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Old amp, no sound


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Hope this question is okay here...

I have an old Eminar amplifier which I haven't used for a few years and there's no sound, nothing at all. Everything looks okay and there's no burning smells, all valves are glowing like normal, just no sound at all. I thought it must a short in the output but can't see any issue. I might take it to a tech but I want to at least have a go at finding the problem myself first. Anyone here got suggestions?

cheers

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8 hours ago, Crusader said:

Anyone here got suggestions?

Swap tubes with known good ones is the usual first step. Beyond that you're largely looking at opening it up and examining it looking for obvious visual faults (poor soldering, loose components/wires, cracked/bulging/burnt components etc), or probing various parts of the circuit with the amp powered up, which comes with the mandatory caveats of working on live equipment exposed to high voltages. If you feel uncomfortable with doing that you're probably better off passing it on to your nominated tech. 

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Thanks for the advice. Yes I picked up some new valves today from Mega Music and...

Before I swapped the tubes I decided to try again first. I turned the volume knob up all the way and back and forth and Ta Da it burst back to life, however it went bad again after a while. Something to note, it was making loud crackling sounds even with both channel volumes all the way down

First thing I did was change the three preamp tubes and it was good as gold. Then I did an experiment. First I noted that the pins on one of the original valves looked tarnished and suspected a bad connection. I tried that valve in my Blues Jnr and it worked just fine. Now I have the Eminar with all the old valves and its working perfectly, just bad connections!

So now I have plenty of spare valves and I've learnt a few things

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