In the process of sizing up what I need to cobble together for screening preamp and power amp tubes that I've collected over the past 12 years, to see what's useable, I pulled down off the shelves a Yamaha T-100 Rack Mount Guitar amp. It's been sitting up there, or at least got moved up there in March 2009 when I set up shop here at CenterStaging, LLC in Burbank, CA. This heavy 4U rack mount product has been collecting dust all this time up there, no tubes installed, but, it's an interesting piece that I've never seen before, apart from here. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the Service Manual for the product series.
My initial thoughts were to add 1 ohm cathode resistors with test points on the rear panel for screening power tubes (6L6GC's, 5881's), maybe even EL34's with a circuit change. Revise the Slave Output jack to a Preamp Output/Pwr Amp input jack that normal's thru, so there would be direct input to that section of the amp.
Then, while photographing the outsides, I noticed on the rear panel this was Designed by M.J. Soldano, and built at a Yamaha factory in Thomaston, GA. I'll have to plead ignorance for NOT knowing about Marianno Soldano, but no doubt many here on the forum definitely do. He passed away in Nov, 2020, while his company continues on producing his products. I've never seen one myself.
I found the website: https://www.soldano.com/ and while looking under M.J. Soldano, found links to the obituary before finding the company website. So, perhaps this amp that was built by Yamaha has more value than just becoming a suitable tube test fixture.
The Yamah T100 series manual is here:
Yamaha T50_100_SM.pdf
My initial thoughts were to add 1 ohm cathode resistors with test points on the rear panel for screening power tubes (6L6GC's, 5881's), maybe even EL34's with a circuit change. Revise the Slave Output jack to a Preamp Output/Pwr Amp input jack that normal's thru, so there would be direct input to that section of the amp.
Then, while photographing the outsides, I noticed on the rear panel this was Designed by M.J. Soldano, and built at a Yamaha factory in Thomaston, GA. I'll have to plead ignorance for NOT knowing about Marianno Soldano, but no doubt many here on the forum definitely do. He passed away in Nov, 2020, while his company continues on producing his products. I've never seen one myself.
I found the website: https://www.soldano.com/ and while looking under M.J. Soldano, found links to the obituary before finding the company website. So, perhaps this amp that was built by Yamaha has more value than just becoming a suitable tube test fixture.
The Yamah T100 series manual is here:
Yamaha T50_100_SM.pdf
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