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check out this scenario

11/18/2004 6:00 PM
John	check out this scenario So the more I read about tube amps it seems the biggest no no is to NOT hook up the amp to speakers. This can cause major damage everyone says. Also tubes can go bad and short things. All in all the more I read it seems tube amps are really very tempermental compared to those old solid state amps that cost 50 bucks but go forever. Anyhow I have a question concerning power transformers and impedence matching etc. Say you're playing at a gig and all of a sudden you can't hear your guitar any more. You wiggle your cable, you smack your pedals looking for a weak signal cable. You do this for lets say 2-3 minutes trying to fix it before stopping and looking closer at things. Now lets say the problem is a faulty speaker cable. Basically a short. So now instead of a impedence mismatch the cable has created an open circuit of infinate impedance, basically to me the same as playing without a speaker attached. How long would it take before your amp frys. Seems like a strange question but I just want to know how feeble tube amps are to such things cause at live shows you never know what will go on. Trying to play thru your amp for say 2-3 minutes with an open circuit. Is that all it takes fry a output transformer? Second question would be, should this ever happen while you're playing would you blow a fuse first before your Output transformer took a hit or is there even a fuse in line to prevent such damage?

11/18/2004 6:00 PM

John

check out this scenario

So the more I read about tube amps it seems the biggest no no is to NOT hook up the amp to speakers. This can cause major damage everyone says. Also tubes can go bad and short things. All in all the more I read it seems tube amps are really very tempermental compared to those old solid state amps that cost 50 bucks but go forever. Anyhow I have a question concerning power transformers and impedence matching etc. Say you're playing at a gig and all of a sudden you can't hear your guitar any more. You wiggle your cable, you smack your pedals looking for a weak signal cable. You do this for lets say 2-3 minutes trying to fix it before stopping and looking closer at things. Now lets say the problem is a faulty speaker cable. Basically a short. So now instead of a impedence mismatch the cable has created an open circuit of infinate impedance, basically to me the same as playing without a speaker attached. How long would it take before your amp frys. Seems like a strange question but I just want to know how feeble tube amps are to such things cause at live shows you never know what will go on. Trying to play thru your amp for say 2-3 minutes with an open circuit. Is that all it takes fry a output transformer? Second question would be, should this ever happen while you're playing would you blow a fuse first before your Output transformer took a hit or is there even a fuse in line to prevent such damage?

Replies:

Enzo How long will the amp hold up? How... -- 11/19/2004 12:16 AM