Roadster/Rectifier Preamp Tube Advice Please

[paintballnsk]

Hi guys,

I'm kind of in a hurry. I want to re-tube my roadster in 2 days.

I bought 4 JJ 12ax7's and 2 JJ 12at7's. The roadster currently has 6 tung sol 12ax7's in it. The cleans got a little too dirty for my taste. It's still a good sounding amp, but I wanted to try something new, and utilize the gain stages for a good balance of clean channels and dirty channels.

I play heavy metal, but I need good clear cleans. I usually run my gains at 1:00ish and put a tube screamer infront of the amp.

I really don't understand how the pre-amp stages work. The Tung Sol tubes are only like 5 months old, they should be in good shape.

So given that, I have 6 Tung Sol 12ax7's, 4 JJ 12ax7's, and 2 JJ 12at7's, where should I put the tubes (from left to right looking at the back of the amp) to give me a good balance of cleans and heavy distortion?

Thanks,
-Zed

 

[paintballnsk]

bump... no love?

 

[EtherealWidow]

A good place to start off would be reading the manual on what each preamp tube functions are in the amp. Then read some of Watford Valve's tube evaluations along with the evaluation from The Tube Store. It's the best place to start. I wouldn't really advise trying to find your tone in 2 days.

http://thetubestore.com/12ax7review.html

http://www.watfordvalves.com/reports.asp

 

[212Mavguy]

Widow's post is a good one...+1

RTFM to start just like he sez.

 

[paintballnsk]

I put these in and am very happy with the results:

1 - JJ 12AT7
2 - JJ 12AX7
3 - JJ 12AX7
4 - JJ 12AX7
5 - JJ 12AX7
6 - Tung-Sol 12AX7

I got a lot more headroom on the clean channel before breakup and it really smoothed out the leads on channel 3. I'm pretty happy with it. Channel 2 is still the most useless channel on the amp.

I will never buy Tung-Sol preamp tubes for the roadster again. They sound great in the DC, but now I want to try JJ's in the DC to see if it makes a drastic difference for the better as well.

Mesa was a little adamant about strictly using only 12AX7's in a rectifier. I'm pretty happy with that 12AT7 in V1.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[EtherealWidow]

Yeah from what I hear, Tung Sols can be a bit on the bright side and have a lot of gain, so it's pretty easy to kill your audience with an ice pick death depending on what cab you're using. When you're not in a rush to retube your amp next time you should think about getting a cocktail of different tubes.