Greetings, I'm posting this in a few different spots trying to find an answer.
I own a few Soldano heads and recently acquired a BAD SLO100 used. Sadly, it's experiencing some issues. Apologies for the long post, but I'm hoping to avoid the usual comments/solutions, as I've explored those already. Here we go:
The amp sounds great but has an intermittent issue that’s been tough to pin down. Occasionally, when first striking a chord on the Overdrive channel the amp will have a weak signal before the full tone comes through, making the signal go from rather weak to audibly being louder. Sometimes the signal will briefly shrink away during play, which is really distracting, and then come right back. However, confusingly, sometimes the amp seems to behave relatively normally with little intermittent weak signal issues.
I would prefer to use the amp with JJ 6L6 tubes, unfortunately when I switched to those it made the signal cutting out issue even worse. Worse still, it introduced a loud oscillation, making the amp virtually unplayable. I am capable of checking and adjusting the bias. I did so and it fell within nominal parameters with both stock 5881 tubes and the 6L6s.
I have attempted tube rolling the preamp tubes and different sets of 6L6 tubes, but to no avail. An observation I’ve made is that channel switching greatly affects the momentary signal loss which is only righted by immediately re-strumming a chord. Sustained notes across channel switching from clean to overdrive always results in signal loss. The issues are exclusive to the Overdrive channel with the clean/crunch behaving normally, so far as I can tell. I've used D3 in all switches and jacks, but the issue persists. Even with a footswitch plugged in, toggling the Bright switch and Clean/crunch switch has a tendency to trigger the signal loss. Shouldn't the presence of the footswitch bypass those issues all together?
I’ve had the amp in with a well known local amp builder and he isolated the signal loss to the first relay which handles channel switching. However, after replacing the relay, thinking it was bad or damaged, he was ultimately unable to fix the issue and was unsure of where the signal loss originates. He ruled out an bias issues in the preamp or a failed grid leak resistor.
As you can tell, I’m very disappointed and frustrated as it’s been a dream of mine to own an SLO100. BAD was relatively unhelpful and so I’m turning to whomever I can that might know more about this issue or hopefully find someone who has experience working on the new BAD builds. Are you able to recommend anyone who may be able to help? If this is not the right place to ask, can you recommend a forum or message board where I could post instead?
I have a Avenger and a Yamaha T100 as well. Both perform flawlessly although I tend to blow tubes a lot with the masters on 7! Thanks
I'll post the videos of this issue if need be.
Topic: Signal Issue with BAD Soldano SLO100 (Read 1971 times)