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In Reply to: RE: AES SixPacs - Replacing Jensen PIO caps? posted by Spike on February 22, 2016 at 15:25:57
Given the amps are 12 years old with about 3500 hours of use, what preventive maintenance steps should I take to ensure the amps are in good working order. I would like to keep these amps for a long time, 15-20 more years.
Thanks,
Spike
Follow Ups:
3500 hours? Consider getting a spare Set of tubes to gave on hand.Keep them clean inside and out
Get a schematic and check voltages with a high impedance volt meter like a DMM after amps have warmed up a long time. Leaky coupling capacitors will show up in term of voltages being off. But sometimes the symptoms don't appear until everything is good and hot.
If you're worried connect a dummy load, signal generator, and oscilloscope and check performance... Power output, symmetry of clipping, distortion and voltage gain. Any variation between channels spells trouble.
But honestly 3500 hours is nothing - come back in another ten years or when there's a problem to be fixed :)
Think of your amplifiers at this point in time like a 30 year old human in good health... sure it's good to get a physical examination, but assuming they haven't been subject to any abuse like operation at high temperature or in dirty conditions, or extreme hours like being left on 24/7, they should be well far away from serious problems.
Edits: 02/23/16
"Get a schematic" From Cary? They will tell you that they don't exist.
"It is better to remain silent and thought a fool, then speak and remove all doubt." A. Lincoln
To Cary's credit, the schematics are available for discontinued products like SixPacs. I've purchased a set of schematic for the SixPacs. They look to be manually drawn, with modification date and Dennis Had's signature at the bottom corner. That's a bonus!
Seriously?
That is terrible. I have seen some of their stuff reverse engineered, and they do seem to do things like exceed the maximum input filter capacitor size on rectifier tubes.
All the same, tube stuff is fairly simple. Checking voltages between the channels should be enough, if they don't match within say 10%, you know something is up. It's very unlikely two capacitors would fail at exactly the same time in exactly the same way.
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