Ceriatone Forum

Hello there,

my OTS HRM 50 behaves somehow strange since a couple of days:
While practicing in our rehearsal-room it happened, that the preamp-output on the clean channel escalated dramatically for a second. The input-led on my g-major
turned red at once. The sound was loud and gainy for a second. After a moment the amp worked as usually again.

This odd situation repeated several times, but seemed to get rarer with proceeding practice-time and a warmed up amp.

What could be the reason?

Please help
Andreas

Hard to say. The first and easiest thing would be to check the tubes and make sure they're secure in their sockets and no visual signs of problems. Beyond that, a faulty capacitor or bad connection somewhere would be a suspect, especially if it continues. Do you have anything else in the loop? Did you build the amp? Without being able to reproduce the same symptom makes it hard to troubleshoot. But if it's a component like a cap, connection or even transformer it very likely will continue to get worse.

Also, what's the chance of voltage spikes in your practice room? Although it would have to be a heck of one to cause that kind of reaction.

foa: Thanks for your answer.

It's a pity I can't reproduce the failure on purpose. The amp was built by ceriatone. Only my c-lator with the connected g-major was in the loop.
But....I opened the amp before this odd thing started to happen, to mount the "hrm on/off-switch" into the chassis.
It can't be the switch itself, because I used it for many weeks before (it was just connected to a wire hanging outside the amp for test puposes) and it worked well.
- It still does, but now it is screwed into the chassis.

Maybe I really caused a lose contact, I just don't know where I should start searching for it. ???

Andreas

Are you certain that your soldering is solid? I only ask not knowing how skilled you are.

I've started doing more repair work on pedals pedals (some DIY, some modded name brand stuff bought off ebay) and I'm totally shocked at some of the awful soldering work that I'm guessing someone thought was acceptable. (little crumbly balls of solder barey melted onto the contact, etc.) These are all problems waiting to happen. Something could work for any length of time until it finally fails due to vibration, thermal cycling, etc.