DIY HiFi Forum

Posted by Jim Ng (A) on August 15, 2006 at 02:51:24

After almost 5 years, my reliable Ella finally gave up on me. During a regular listening session, I smelt and saw smoke coming out of the amplifier ! Upon checking, found the left channel output transformer short-circuited, overheated and causing all the wax paper to melt!

What could be the reason ? I had not tamper the system for the last 3 years. My Ella was a plain vanilla (with upgraded Jenson Caps) using stock input tubes and KT88 as output. I remembered it was biasing at about 0.5vdc. Can this be age or am I driving the amp to hard (80% max volume at the time of incident)?

I was lucky that I was in the my listening when the incident happened. Managed to pull the plug before a real melt-down occur. You can see the other pictures I took of the amp.

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/monomanian/album?.dir=/fd12scd&.src=ph&.tok=phmpDWFBmNM2y.rx

• http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/monomanian/album?.dir=/fd12scd&.src=ph&.tok=phmpDWFBmNM2y.rx   (Open in New Window)

• Re: Ella in smoke ! - Clive 09:20:03 08/15/06 (0)
• Re: Ella in smoke ! - bcherry 06:39:25 08/15/06 (2)
  • Re: Ella in smoke ! - Jimng 09:24:23 08/17/06 (1)
    • Re: Ella in smoke ! - bcherry 17:03:29 08/17/06 (0)

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