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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Did I blow out an amp?
Did I blow out an amp?
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the_happy_honker
53 posts
Jan 18, 2011
1:23 AM
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I was in a music store the other day. I wanted to go amplified for the first time, so I was looking to try out some low-watt tube amps. I asked if they had an SM57 I could use. They said they didn't have that, but they had an ElectroVoice PL80, which they said had similar characteristics.
So I tried it and discovered, hey, wow, my cupping was good and I could get a nice overdriven tone out of most of the amps.
The Vox AC4TV I played through had good tone, but the volume wasn't so hot. Suddenly it started cutting out and I thought, man, that is some sag! It died quickly. It developed a constant hum at all volumes and wouldn't respond at all. I checked with another amp to be sure it wasn't the mic.
Did this just happen by chance or was there something wrong with the amp/mic combination?
IIRC, I had the tone knob at about 2 - 3 o'clock and the volume at about 10 o'clock. A PL80 has an impedance of about 600 ohms and there wasn't any impedance matching transformer in the chain.
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5F6H
474 posts
Jan 18, 2011
2:58 AM
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No, you did not blow the amp. There was something else wrong with the amp
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garry
22 posts
Jan 18, 2011
7:44 AM
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amp killer!
:-)
Last Edited by on Jan 18, 2011 7:45 AM
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Greg Heumann
999 posts
Jan 18, 2011
7:56 AM
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You can't hurt an amp by plugging in an unpowered microphone in any way, shape or form.
There is a phenomenon in electronics known in the industry as "infant mortality rate." If you were to look at the failure rate of individual components, it is very high very early on, then drops rapidly and remains low until the component nears its end of life (which will be in the 10's or hundreds of thousands of hours.)
Given the shape of that curve, no matter how long you test something at the factory, the chance of it failing soon is always greatest when it is brand new.
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/Greg
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