Triaxis Sound Issues
- Thread starter Peter M
- Start date
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THTH,
Being too hard on Mesa? Considering the $200 spent Watson Electronics for a useless service that didn't even diagnose that there was a problem with the unit, the $250 odd spent at the Australian Mesa maintenance and service shop Pro Audio that missed the cause of the low gain and faulty switching, the $170 spent at JB Electronics to at last identify failed resistors as the cause of the Triaxis's sound issues, the costs of freight and time spent ferrying the unit to repairers by car, the hundreds of hours spent futilely tweaking the unit to try and coax a usable sound out of it, well meaning advice to the effect that the Triaxis is a complicated unit and that I don't know how to program it, the dearth of information available online to point users towards a fix, and the fact that after all of this another ***** resistor fails......
The longer term solution would be to replace every resistor in the unit but given the time and financial investment in the unit to date and the fact that this would involve extensive bench time I'll probably just keep it for home use as is and try get by with Dual Rectifier live ( not the same thing I know but apart from my Marshall Superleads, 800s, and hot-rodded clones the option I consider least likely to give up the ghost).
Being too hard on Mesa? Considering the $200 spent Watson Electronics for a useless service that didn't even diagnose that there was a problem with the unit, the $250 odd spent at the Australian Mesa maintenance and service shop Pro Audio that missed the cause of the low gain and faulty switching, the $170 spent at JB Electronics to at last identify failed resistors as the cause of the Triaxis's sound issues, the costs of freight and time spent ferrying the unit to repairers by car, the hundreds of hours spent futilely tweaking the unit to try and coax a usable sound out of it, well meaning advice to the effect that the Triaxis is a complicated unit and that I don't know how to program it, the dearth of information available online to point users towards a fix, and the fact that after all of this another ***** resistor fails......
The longer term solution would be to replace every resistor in the unit but given the time and financial investment in the unit to date and the fact that this would involve extensive bench time I'll probably just keep it for home use as is and try get by with Dual Rectifier live ( not the same thing I know but apart from my Marshall Superleads, 800s, and hot-rodded clones the option I consider least likely to give up the ghost).
I've run an A/B test with two triaxis I own, one produced in ~2007, perfect sounding, and the other produced in ~1996, which I purchased two months ago.
The second triaxis has the same symptoms as Peter described here : Lack of gain, excessive and unfocused basses in LD1 Green and Yellow modes (Red is not that bad actually...). Retubing gave me extra definition and presence but didn't solve the problem on LD1. I was starting suspecting a V1A cathode capacitor failure, and then I came here and read Peter story. I'm now definitely convinced
...
If so, just two soldering points and one new quality capacitor should suffice. I'll try to replace it and keep you up to date, I suspect this should interest many Triaxis users.
The second triaxis has the same symptoms as Peter described here : Lack of gain, excessive and unfocused basses in LD1 Green and Yellow modes (Red is not that bad actually...). Retubing gave me extra definition and presence but didn't solve the problem on LD1. I was starting suspecting a V1A cathode capacitor failure, and then I came here and read Peter story. I'm now definitely convinced
...If so, just two soldering points and one new quality capacitor should suffice. I'll try to replace it and keep you up to date, I suspect this should interest many Triaxis users.
