Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

Major Surgery

I can't believe that I totally forgot to write about this. About a month back I was installing a Scumnico from SouthBay ampworks (Jim is a super awesome guy) into my amplifier. Since I'm a bit of a tinkerer I wanted to solder the speakers in because I hate those awful spade terminals that the manufacturers use. Direct connections just work so much better anyway--as we will discover further evidence for in a minute. After performing this minor procedure I put the amp back together and turned it on. The tubes lit up--one of them flashed at me as european tubes do--and I hit the standby switch. Total darkness. No sound. Uh oh...

After some careful thought experiments I figured that I had not soldered the connections to the speaker spades correctly, thus resulting in no load on my output transformer (an open circuit) and consequently frying it. So, feeling like a complete idiot, I called up Will Loftin at Orange USA and scheduled a repair time. I took the amp guts in to the headquarters located here in Atlanta and luckily Will identified the issue immediately. The connectors from the hot wire to the heating pads--a component that sends current to the vacuum tubes--eventually fails due to the type of connectors used. These connections are facilitated by cheap plastic spade connectors. The spade terminals will oxidize over time and cause intermittent connectivity on that terminal--which when we are dealing with higher current values results in a tiny and very hot arc welder. After some time, the heat from the arcing electricity will melt the plastic connectors, killing the connection to that pad entirely. No current to the pad equals no current to the tube, which equals no sound.

So how do we fix this? Simple. Will soldered in the connections to the heating pads directly. Fixed forever. Will indicated that this is a common problem in the model of amplifier I am using (AD-30R combo). I understand cost cutting, but designing a product such that it will eventually fail is just ludicrous. You cannot tell me that the intelligent people over at Orange's engineering department didn't think that the plastic spade connectors would never eventually oxidize and melt.

Since I was already going to have to pay labor for the point-to-point wiring of the heating pads, I asked Will to upgrade my output transformer to a mercury, re-cap the entire amp, and solder in any spade terminal connections that could be safely and practically wired that way. A couple of days later and I walked into the shop and there my amp was--completely custom wired and working like it's brand new. The moral of this story? There is some validity to the extended reliability claims of a point-to-point wired an amplifier. Beware of companies who use this as a marketing gimmick, however. It doesn't take much longer to solder in a connection than it does to crimp a spade connecter and I do not consider it worth a 15% increase in MSRP.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the results and with the folks over in the Orange USA shop. The amp is orders of magnitude quieter than it used to be; the only audible buzz is due to the preamp tubes that I am using, and the tone is phenomenal! If any of you out there have an Orange AD-30R (or any other commercially produced amp) I would highly recommend at a minimum getting the heater pads and the output transformer point-to-point wired with some high quality wire. I also recommend that you pay your local amp tech to take care of it since that's the safest route.