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talabereldon

RD50 suddenly sounds anemic...any ideas?

Hello, esteemed fellow Music Man fans. Has your amp tone ever gone from the clean, ringing chime you expect to hear to a thin, anemic sound? I have a 112 RD50. Last week, it was frying out the power tubes. I took it into a shop and was told that leaky drivers and burned resistors were the culprit. I had them replaced, put in new 6L6’s and it seems to have solved that problem.
Now, when I play through it on the normal channel, as I usually do, it just sounds kinda sickly. You can whang an open G, and it seems a bit fizzy and diminished. The amp volume is only on 3-4, so it isn’t turned up enough to make the thing distort. It should sound clear and clean. I switched over to the distortion side and it seems worse over there. I don’t know very much about amp operation. Should I now try replacing the 12AX7 tube? That’s about all that I can easily do, but if that wouldn’t likely be the issue, I don’t wanna spend the money on a new tube. The one that’s in it doesn’t look burnt out or anything. I do realize it’s a 35-40 yr old amp and things break down/wear out, but what might this be? Any thoughts/opinions greatly appreciated!

lmv

Take it back

It's usually where you last monkeyed around with something :)
I'd take it back to the shop where you had work done. Changing the limiter tube will not make any difference on the sound through the clean channel. One culprit could be the front end IC or maybe a bad pot - feeding signal through the reverb return jack (RCA on underside of chassis) could tell you something.

Cheers,
Lars Verholt

talabereldon

Yeah, I guess I'll have to do

Yeah, I guess I'll have to do that. Thanks for educating me about the 12AX7 and for replying to begin with!

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