newbie may have destroyed roadking

[jmcelroy]

Hi all,

I searched the forum assuming that you get newbs like me in here asking the same question frequently but I didn't find any threads. Sorry if I missed something obvious.

Last night I played the heck out of the roadking I just got off of eBay. Played for about an hour. Because I didn't actually understand how my attenuator works I was playing with no load or little load. Nothing went kablooie or anything.

Is my amp ok? What should I do or expect now?

Thank you very much.

 

[ryjan]

Mesa's are very tough amps. Probably just shortened the life of your power tubes.

 

[jmcelroy]

Mesa's are very tough amps. Probably just shortened the life of your power tubes.

Awesome. Thank you very much.

 

[94Tremoverb]

If it still works OK when you connect it to the speakers, you probably haven't done it any harm apart from shortening the tube life as ryjan said.

 

[Addictedtokaos]

I did the same thing with mine after doing the FX loop mood to my rectoverb. I forgot to connect the speaker.

I spoke to a few amp tech. One said the modern amps are pretty solid. First thing to go would be your powertubes followed by the fuse.

If everything still works and you get no strange sounds then you are most likely fine.

 

[jmcelroy]

I did the same thing with mine after doing the FX loop mood to my rectoverb. I forgot to connect the speaker.

I spoke to a few amp tech. One said the modern amps are pretty solid. First thing to go would be your powertubes followed by the fuse.

If everything still works and you get no strange sounds then you are most likely fine.

Whew. Thanks!

Do you happen to know what qualifies as a strange sound in this context? Should I be scrutinizing every subtle tonal variation or just looking out for loud freaky noises? Thanks!

 

[plapnab]

I played a three hour set once. Started the night plugged into two 8 ohm cabs out of the 4 ohm outputs. At some point (not sure when) one of the cabs got unplugged. Could have been like that for three hours, could have been five min...at any rate, that was a year ago and my DR is still running fine.

 

[Halfstack]

I had a scare with my new Road King 3 weeks ago. One of my bandmates was running a mic cable behind my rig (something he will never do again) and somehow unplugged one of my speaker cables (output A) without me knowing it. I am very, very particular about making sure I'm all plugged in, and I had checked it about 5 times before this happened. This happened during the time I was gone getting a spare cab because my other guitarist "blew" his up somehow (ended up he just wired it backwards :lol: ) and I was rushing because we had to go on soon.

After I got back we had to start right away. We played 3 songs with me thinking "OK something is not sounding right at ALL"...I'm up there checking everything trying to figure out why pure crap is being spewn from by cab (aside from just because I was playing, lol). 3 songs later (about 15 minutes total) I look at the back of my amp and see my speaker cable isn't all the way into my output A jack. After almost having a massive heart attack I jammed it back into place and everything was fine.

So by the end of the night the guitar players were fine...but our bassist had 3 blown speakers in his cab :lol: May have been the equipment nightmare gig from hell, I dunno.

I was still worried for a few days after it happened that I may have hurt my amp, but 3 weeks later its still kicking.

 

[jbird]

I don't really get the need for an attenuator? Mesa's sound darn fine at bedroom levels! I mean, it's not a non-master type of amp? You've got a multiple pre-amp gain stage in front, and multi-watt settings (50 watt)? Unless your using your attenuator for other purposes besides db cuts, headphones, silent recording?