Well, needless to say I need some assistance from everyone here at the Boogie Board. I have a LSS that I purchased about five years ago and, frankly, it's never been right. I immediately started having problems with it blowing rectifier tubes. I took it to my local Mesa-Boogie rep, who replaced the tube and gave it back to me. Well, five Mesa rectifier tubes later, I got ticked off and sent my entire chassis back and mesa said there was nothing wrong with my amp. How could that be? I kept trying it at gigs and experiencing the same problem. I'd get about an hour into the gig and the tone would go to hell and break up until I was getting no volume on either channel. Losing what little hair I have left, I removed the chassis, wrapped it in bubble wrap and mailed it back to the factory so thay could figure it out. Multiple telephone calls later, they said that they could not replicate the problem, so therefore there wasn't one. I asked them to leave the amp on for a while before testing it, and they did that too, but no problem could be detected. I got the amp back and turned it on with nothing between my guitar and the amp but a cord and.....guess what? Same old same old. 
Needless to say, I was pretty pissed and took my $1800 door stop and put it in a closet, intent on selling it when the recession eased up. Well folks, that didn't happen either. Thanks Congress.
Fast forward two years. A new guitarist comes into my band and he plays an identical amp and it sounds just amazing. Great tone and volume to spare. He talks me into getting my LSS out of the closet and playing it side by side with his. I replace the blown Mesa rectifier tube with a NOS RCA since all seven of the Mesa tubes I've placed in that position have failed. We try that for a while, but eventually the same old problem crops up when I plug into the effects loop and turn it on. I have spare 12AX7 tubes, so I replace the V3 tube in the effects loop thinking that might cure the situation and, twenty minutes later, that tube fizzles out. Same problem. I put another one in and....same deal. I get twenty minutes out of the tube and it craps out. BTW, the fuse never blows during any of these blown tubes.
So, I fax the bench guys at Mesa-Boogie about the problem and they say to clean the jacks on the effects loop. ??????? They've been very nice through this whole ordeal, but the last time I looked, dirty jacks don't blow tubes. Being a good customer, I try that anyway. So after all that, I take the amp to rehearsal again and plug it next to my bandmate's LSS and, bah humbug, the thing has all the volume, tone, and character of a 1960's transistor radio. Unless someone here on the Boogie Board has some ideas about what to do with this thing, I'm going to contibute it to a landfill and go back to my 1977 Fender ProReverb which works every damned time I plug it in and has never,I repeat never, blown a tube or failed me at a gig. Help!
Needless to say, I was pretty pissed and took my $1800 door stop and put it in a closet, intent on selling it when the recession eased up. Well folks, that didn't happen either. Thanks Congress.Fast forward two years. A new guitarist comes into my band and he plays an identical amp and it sounds just amazing. Great tone and volume to spare. He talks me into getting my LSS out of the closet and playing it side by side with his. I replace the blown Mesa rectifier tube with a NOS RCA since all seven of the Mesa tubes I've placed in that position have failed. We try that for a while, but eventually the same old problem crops up when I plug into the effects loop and turn it on. I have spare 12AX7 tubes, so I replace the V3 tube in the effects loop thinking that might cure the situation and, twenty minutes later, that tube fizzles out. Same problem. I put another one in and....same deal. I get twenty minutes out of the tube and it craps out. BTW, the fuse never blows during any of these blown tubes.
So, I fax the bench guys at Mesa-Boogie about the problem and they say to clean the jacks on the effects loop. ??????? They've been very nice through this whole ordeal, but the last time I looked, dirty jacks don't blow tubes. Being a good customer, I try that anyway. So after all that, I take the amp to rehearsal again and plug it next to my bandmate's LSS and, bah humbug, the thing has all the volume, tone, and character of a 1960's transistor radio. Unless someone here on the Boogie Board has some ideas about what to do with this thing, I'm going to contibute it to a landfill and go back to my 1977 Fender ProReverb which works every damned time I plug it in and has never,I repeat never, blown a tube or failed me at a gig. Help!
