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Blackface Pro Reverb - vibrato channel has very low volume

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  • Blackface Pro Reverb - vibrato channel has very low volume

    Hi everyone. I have a question that I haven't seen addressed already, so hopefully this isn't something that's already been addressed.

    I have a 67 Pro Reverb that I bought from the second owner in 2001. I used it regularly with no trouble until September 2005. One night I was letting a friend play through it at band practice, and I guess there wasn't enough ventilation in the back. After playing for two hours, the amp just stopped producing any sound. It didn't happen suddenly, but over the course of a few minutes. When I shut it down I remember the power transformer being extremely hot.

    Since my wife was about to have a baby and I had other amps to play through, I never got around to taking it in for repair. Every now and then I'd try swapping in new tubes to see if that would fix it, or open it up and look for visible problems, but never saw anything. If I tried to play through the amp, I could hear my guitar, but I had to turn the volume all the way to 10, and it was very quiet, with a lot of crackling and static. This happened on both the normal and vibrato channels.

    Recently I decided to get it running again, and figured I'd try doing it myself. I sat down with my multimeter and the schematic, measured everything to see what was out of spec, and ordered some parts. I also got some new preamp and rectifier tubes.

    The first thing I did was replace all of the filter caps and the bias cap. After I did that, the amp sounded a little louder, but I still got the crackling and static on both channels. The next thing I did was to replace any bad components around the PI stage. I replaced the 82k resistor and .001uf cap, and after doing that, replaced all of the 25uf cathode bypass caps. When I fired the amp up, the normal channel sounded loud and strong, with no crackling or distortion. The vibrato channel sounded clean too, but was as loud on 10 as the normal channel was on 2. I tried swapping in various tubes that I know to be good in all slots, but nothing changes.

    After that, I went through and replaced the other out-of-spec components, and returned a few modded components to the values specified on the schematic.

    Even after doing all of this, I still have the volume issue on the vibrato channel. I've also noticed something odd regarding two of the components on the tagboard. There's an 820 ohm resistor that connects a wire leading to the extension speaker output. When I measure the resistor while soldered into the circuit, it measures at 95 ohms. If I desolder it, it reads correctly at 820 ohms. This is without the amp being plugged in.

    Similarly, there's a 470k resistor that connects to the brown wire that goes to the reverb control. This one also reads extremely low when soldered in, but normal when removed.

    Does anyone have any suggestions for what I should look at next, or what might be going on with those two resistors? I've checked voltages, and everything checks out, although they're a bit high all the way around. But from what I understand, that's normal for blackface amps due to the bump in modern line voltage.

    Thanks in advance.

  • #2
    Those low resistances are completely normal as you are reading other components that the resistors are connected to.
    Move on...

    Go to the little vibrato roach thing.... it looks like a 1" piece of black shrink tubing around a neon bulb and CdS cell with four thin wires coming out of it.
    Remove all the two wires closest to the pots (or all four wires) and test your vibrato channel again.
    If the volume comes back up, you have a bad CdS cell in the vibrato bug.
    Bruce

    Mission Amps
    Denver, CO. 80022
    www.missionamps.com
    303-955-2412

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    • #3
      Welcome to the place.

      It sounds like you need to start tracing the signal to see where it dies. Pulling the trem LDR that Bruce mentioned would be a good place to start. You can also unsolder the lead to the top of the intensity control to test the same thing.

      You know that the power amp is ok, so if you shake the reverb springs do you get a loud sound from the speakers? If you do, then the problem is before the reverb mixer tube, if not then start there at the 4th preamp tube from the right and work backwards to the input.

      Are all of the plate and cathode voltages close to spec? Are the tube sockets clean and tight? How about the coupling caps?

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      • #4
        Thanks guys. Lifting the trem roach didn't help. And shaking/banging on the reverb tank doesn't make anything louder either. I haven't gotten to tensioning or cleaning the tube sockets yet, and all of the plate and cathode voltages are slightly above spec, but uniformly so. Plate voltages are running around +280v to +290v and cathodes are around +2.3v. All of the coupling caps look to have been swapped out with new ones, with the exception of the 0.003uf cap that ties to V4 pin 1 and the reverb control, so I may investigate that.

        While checking voltages again, I did notice that the "popping" noises were quieter when I set the probe on the connections for the V4 plate resistors than with the V2 plate resistors.

        Something else I've noticed is that even with the reverb knob all the way up,there isn't a lot of reverb. So that makes me think that there's something going on in that section. I'll investigate more tomorrow.
        Last edited by MSW; 05-26-2010, 03:01 AM.

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