Honestly I actually forgot that I started this thread, wasn't trying to be fishy at all.
I had just noticed in my experience that the express amps had tended to have problems, fresh out of box or otherwise, and I was wondering if anyone else had seen that, or if it was just a fluke of luck.
I can say that in the last four or five months, I haven't actually seen a single Mesa product come back with issues, but for at least five or six months before that, I had seen at least a half dozen or more come back that needed to be shipped out for repair, not just ones that had been on the floor, but fresh in box ones special ordered as replacements for ones that had problems. And then, for the several years before THAT, I hadn't seen any Mesas need repair either. It was only that several month period when we were moving a significant number of the Express amps that I was seeing a lot of them come back busted.
Unfortunately we never actually saw the repair bills from the warranty station, so I don't know what the problems were, other than one that the guy told me had blown a capacitor on the mainboard (that one actually started smoking when it was first turned on), so it could have been tubes or something else. That's the reason why I started the thread in the first place, I was wondering if it was just some quirk or if those amps had actually had some kind of problem. It seems like some people have actually seen similar problems, so perhaps they did actually have a bad run of them for a while, I don't know.
Anyway, in terms of the actual problems that I had seen with them... sometimes they just had no output , and sometimes they would sound good until you turned them up, at which point if you hit a louder note, they'd fart out/go into blocking distortion, or start squealing or motorboating extremely loudly...
So, yeah, no agenda, just curiosity and forgetfulness. I actually was mostly wondering because if you look at all the techniques and technology Mesa uses to make a solid, reliable amp, it was always surprising to me to see a significant number of them come back. And, whatever the problem is, it seems to have been rectified as well, and now that we're seeing the newer amps like the Mark V's and the Electra Dyne's, the reliability level has remained at a very high level. And no Mesa bashing either; I own a mesa half-stack and I'm loving it.
I had just noticed in my experience that the express amps had tended to have problems, fresh out of box or otherwise, and I was wondering if anyone else had seen that, or if it was just a fluke of luck.
I can say that in the last four or five months, I haven't actually seen a single Mesa product come back with issues, but for at least five or six months before that, I had seen at least a half dozen or more come back that needed to be shipped out for repair, not just ones that had been on the floor, but fresh in box ones special ordered as replacements for ones that had problems. And then, for the several years before THAT, I hadn't seen any Mesas need repair either. It was only that several month period when we were moving a significant number of the Express amps that I was seeing a lot of them come back busted.
Unfortunately we never actually saw the repair bills from the warranty station, so I don't know what the problems were, other than one that the guy told me had blown a capacitor on the mainboard (that one actually started smoking when it was first turned on), so it could have been tubes or something else. That's the reason why I started the thread in the first place, I was wondering if it was just some quirk or if those amps had actually had some kind of problem. It seems like some people have actually seen similar problems, so perhaps they did actually have a bad run of them for a while, I don't know.
Anyway, in terms of the actual problems that I had seen with them... sometimes they just had no output , and sometimes they would sound good until you turned them up, at which point if you hit a louder note, they'd fart out/go into blocking distortion, or start squealing or motorboating extremely loudly...
So, yeah, no agenda, just curiosity and forgetfulness. I actually was mostly wondering because if you look at all the techniques and technology Mesa uses to make a solid, reliable amp, it was always surprising to me to see a significant number of them come back. And, whatever the problem is, it seems to have been rectified as well, and now that we're seeing the newer amps like the Mark V's and the Electra Dyne's, the reliability level has remained at a very high level. And no Mesa bashing either; I own a mesa half-stack and I'm loving it.
