Ceriatone OTS - bad tube socket lead dress?

[dogears]

The Ceriatone sounded like ass when it arrived. Some was build related and some was the tubes. Nik did not tube it.

The tone was raspy and it really did not even remotely compare to my other amps. So, we opened her up. First I put in some Winged C outputs and some EH preamp tubes. I chose a specific PI tube and set the PI trimmer too. Kind of better. The amp arrived tubed with Sovtek 12AX7WB tubes and a horribly mismatched set of Svetlana New Sensor 6L6 tubes. 25ma and 38ma. Ouch. This was not installed by Ceriatone.

Still, there was something really wrong. Upon looking inside, I saw the issues. The tube socket lead dress was a disaster. The grid resistors on V1a and V2a were bent down, flush on the chassis sitting on the plate leads! V1a 22K grid resistor bare lead was actually touching the plate lead. Major no no..... I bent the resistors up in the air, away from the plates. Also, the PI leads were all on one another. I fanned them apart. The other minor issues were the bass pot cap was a .0012uf. This is pinched right off of the Dlite schematic. The amp has better articulation, imo, with the "correct" .001uf. The cap doesn't need to be a PS series OD. The PS is only available from CE has a .0012uf and that is why Brownnote used it. Not for tone. So, I replaced it with a .001uf. Lastly, the snubbers on V2 sound better as 330pf. The amp had 390pf installed. I replaced.

After all these mods, the amp sounded like a good Dumble style amp should. Fed back well and had a pleasing overall tonality. My Bludos sounded girthier and fuller but they are 100 watters. Plus the Bluesmaster really has the punch and texture. Personally I am not a big fan of 50 watters. I preferred the deeper harmonic textures of the Glaswerks as well. I had no Fuchs 50 watt non HRM to compare, but the 30 I have was much smoother and singing, but with less clean headroom. The 100HRM was much bigger on the bottom and had nice mid textures. After mods, the OTS was a nice sounding amp. It troubled me with the dead and raspy tones until I tweaked it though.

Pictures to follow. I already bent the resistor leads up in the pic and fanned the PI leads.