Studio 22+ - Help!! Still stuck

[Tokaigi]

Hi guys

I have a mesa studio 22+ and i love it, but im lookin for some guidance.

Basically i've had my amp for around 2.5 - 3 years now and i can only remember changing the tubes in it when i first got it. I haven't changed them since or as far as i can remember, they may have been changed after 1 year but not since then.

I've had an FX pedal stowed away for some time thinking it was broken and needed repairing, i came to find it again a couple of weeks ago and when i tested it, it was working again!?! Anyways, that night i had a play around with the FX pedal through the amp, I had the volume low on my amp but the FX pedal was driving it pretty hard because it was still fairly loud. I played at the volume the FX pedal was producing for some time as it was pretty much as loud as i usually play anyway at home.

Ever since using the FX pedal i've noticed that my amp sounds worse than it did before, almost muddy when it should be crunchy, its not a vast change in sound but enough for me to notice it and decide that its wrong.

Logically im thinkin i have damaged the tubes or warn them out or something but im somewhat of a complete novice when it comes to amp technology so was wondering if anyone here could suggest a cause for the change in sound?

Also I have looked at my tubes and three of the pre-amps dont seem to be glowing quite as much as the other two going from position 1 - 5 only 3 & 5 seem to have a bright sort of glow at the end of the philament, the other 3 (1,2 & 4) seem to be duller, which i think has had direct impact on my sound.

Having not changed any of my settings previous to the sound changing it was my only conclusion.

I dont even know but can you even tell this way that the tubes need changing???

Any help would be grately appreciated.

Tok

 

[Spamds]

Hmm... looks like you have same topic 2 times :lol:

 

[jazzIII]

Did you have the FX pedal in the loop (probably because you increased volume with it) or have you otherwise used the loop recently? A common problem with these models seem to be the FX loop jacks, which can have bad "bypass" connection when there is nothing attached in there. Due to oxidization or something with these older amps I think. Try putting a cable in the loop, this should solve the problem.

I have a Studio .22 and a similar thing happened to me a few times.

 

[Tokaigi]

Hi both thanks for the replies sorry about the double postage?! the page errored on me when posted it so that's probably why!

I have had a cable in the FX send/return thing since i bought the amp and i've been told never to remove it, which i haven't done.

Basically i only have two guitar leads, one i use to plug in the foot switch to change from the clean to the crunch channel and the other i use to plug in the guitar.

I took out the guitar lead that i use with the foot switch and plugged that into the input, i then used the input from the FX pedal as my actual input so basically i was running the clean channel on the amp with my guitar signal going through the FX pedal....

hope that makes sense!

Any ideas?

Like i said in my previous post my tubes dont seem to be as bright but then i've not noticed a difference before because in reality i've not had to really check them before now so i dont know if the dullish glow the three have are normal glows or whether they all should be glowing the same?

Like i said im a complete newbie when it comes to amps and dont really know anything of great substance (this could also be applied in the general sense lol)