Attention Amp Gurus:F-30 help

[radmo]

Hi All,
I love my F-30, but it has too much hiss. I have found that this is a common complaint. I called Boogie and they say it's cause the El-84 amps run hotter than the others. Save from retubing,etc, which will clean up my tone, I doubt it will eliminate this hiss....Do You know of any mods,etc., that can be easily done? Perhaps a rebias? Or is it more than a rebias and my require electronics changes? The only known mod advertisements I have found for the F-30 are on http://www.tonehunter.de/custommade/eng_ampmod.html#f30
and he is overseas, and didn't give me any great details

The guys at Mesa have been real cool, but say it's pretty much par for the course. SHame they didn't give too much opportunity for the F-series before moving on to the Express. I'd also be interested if anyone has ideas how to make the Contour function adjustable. (I know I know...Get an Express..easier said than done)


radmo

 

[mndgs59]

:lol: Hi, I understand your frustration.I have an F-50 combo;bought it used last month/like new..it hisses like crazy ! I tried replacing preamp tubes;called Mesa who basically said its "normal" for some of their amps..I've decided as long as there's nothing 'wrong' with it, I'll live with it and Love it!! :lol: The F50 is a great sounding amp.(I do find that less master vol & more gain;in the clean channel,seems to help reduce the hiss). Rich..

 

[Bill Beck]

If you're doing gigs, believe me you won't notice it. I wouldn't trade the hiss for the tone, volume avail. and portability of the F-30.

 

[TractorTom]

I dont know if this will help with your hiss or not but i use a dual channel noise gate. ISP decimator pro, it has two gates one for the front of your amp and one for your loop(has to be series). Seriously this thing is great, kils all noise/hiss etc. I had this hiss issue with a Randall amp and the ISP sorted it out.

 

[recto-robbie]

Dont rush out and buy an express any time soon. Just this morning I purchased a brand new beautiful 5:25 and brought it home. Once I plugged it in and let it warm up for about 5 minutes or so and turned it on, I got so much background hiss I thought something was wrong with it.
It was more like hiss and some sort of weird sound like a water fall or something,,, really sh!itty if you ask me.
The funny thing about it is, the hiss didnt increase with the gain knob,,,only the master volume knobs. I also found it a bit strange that the hiss was the worst on channel 2 blues mode. Imagine that,, 2 higher available gain modes and the worst hiss was on the lesser of the 3. Anyways, after about 3 hours of messing with it I packed it up and got my $1138 back. I would have felt a bit different had the amp been a higher wattage amp. But running it at half way up, if you stopped playing the hiss was very unexceptable to me.
I guess im a bit spoiled with my ROV because even on the highest gain modern mode it is unbelievably quiet. And this amp has some serious brutal gain.
One last note,, I must say I hope Mesa corrects this problem unless they like it like that,,, I had compared this amp in my home against the fender blues deluxe and the peavey classic 30 and by far the sound and stock speaker mesa offered were the tops. Even with the 10inch speaker there was way more deep bass and room filling goodness. If only they could fix the hiss.