Are tube amps fit for purpose?

Cirrus

Adam_MD;178509" said:

My mesa transatlantic has flown from heathrow to lax and back again 6 times now.

Hence the name.

Richardj

hywelg said:

martinw said:

Where have you heard that?

On t'interweb no doubt. If you listen hard enough you can hear dolphins playing backgammon.

Nah, it was on here.  I was having a bit of a 'moment' last night thinking about a few of the classifieds in general.  So many people are reluctant to ship stuff stating that it is far too fragile.  I was on a bit of a crusade to see if our beloved musical gear really is that fragile.

It isn't aimed at anyone in particular, just a general 'are they, aren't they' kind of thing.  Nice to have the positive replies though.

Cirrus

Well, in that context, let me put it like this.

I'll happily transport my own stuff around without giving it a second thought. That includes valve amps, computers, bone china, whatever. I'll dump my Vox into the back of cars, into the disused frozen kitchen with the leaky roof out behind the pub. When a valve goes microphonic and starts buzzing I'll bang on the top of the amp until it stops. When my mate offers to help pack up and accidentally drops the amp I'll laugh it off.

But I wouldn't ship my amp because I know that anything I send by courier is going to be hurled to the ground several times, suffer drops of 2 or 3 meters, and be crushed by thousands of other boxes. Even then it would be fine more often than not, but it becomes a significant risk.

I'm happy to buy new stuff that comes shipped, because if it arrives destroyed it's not my responsibility - I take some pictures and send it back. But if I'm selling an amp it's because I need the money, and can't afford to spend £50+ plus sending an amp to a buyer only to have to refund him and get a broken problem sent back to me. It's a risk I'm not prepared to take, and luckily I don't have to because I've always been able to find a buyer and arrange to meet them.

I can see the frustration if you're in another country, but it's the sellers prerogative IMO.

jpfamps

A lot of guitars get damaged by couriers. Is the guitar fit for purpose?

Richardj

Again, it was a bit of a rant. I guess I've been really lucky as the only time I have had anything damaged was by the French customs dropping a Taylor T5 in it's case and damaging the case.

Guitars are a bit of a similar point though, surely the guitar in a decent (lets face it, what it should come from the manufacturer in) case and then well packed ought to be relatively safe.  My personal experience of using UPS for the last four years has been that they have been very careful and everything has arrived safely.  Who do we consider to be good and bad couriers?

ICBM

The problem is not transport, it's shipping. Two very different sets of conditions, even though both involve moving something from one place to another.

I gig my valve amp with no backup other than spare valves and fuses, and I don't even have a flightcase for my current one. But I wouldn't ship it anywhere. It *will* get mishandled, and the internal parts are heavy enough that they could cause damage no matter how well packed the outside is.

See 'please help me with a speaker problem' in this forum for evidence. It takes a lot of force to shift a speaker magnet on its frame, but that's far from the first time I've seen that. It's quite common in combos and cabs that have been shipped too.

impmann

Yes - I've seen many speakers with the magnet detatched, cabinets split etc all through couriers being tosspieces. We get at least two or three a month...

We've even had a combo that was dropped over 60 feet onto a concrete floor. The cab was shattered, the speaker destroyed and the chassis (valve amp) bent. Refitting the valves saw it power up perfectly, though!! :-) Sadly, the owner wasn't too impressed at the change in the amp's appearance!!

bertie

ICBM said:

The problem is not transport, it's shipping. Two very different sets of conditions, eve

this

martinw

I think the 'problem' with shipping is massively exaggerated by the self-selection process of anecdotal internet reporting.

Nobody goes on the net to report that their amp (or guitar) arrived successfully with no damage.

It's ok saying 'I wouldn't ship it', but I have to ship amps and have been doing so with no problems for several years. I use UPS mainly, but also DHL, DPD and TNT ('Scuse the TLA-fest). One amp went missing (Yodel, when they were an agent for DHL Domestic, unsurprisingly), and only one case of damage as mentioned above caused by a customer's terrible packing.

Correct packing does protect the innards of an amp, as 6" of bubblewrap will cushion any impacts and reduce the forces experienced by the amp. This principle is well-understood in car design.

Some of the statements made in this thread are just silly!

ICBM

martinw said:

I think the 'problem' with shipping is massively exaggerated by the self-selection process of anecdotal internet reporting.

Nobody goes on the net to report that their amp (or guitar) arrived successfully with no damage.

Agreed, but there are still enough incidents to make me avoid the idea on principle were possible, when there's even a small chance of damage which will make a sale worse than unprofitable.

martinw said:

Correct packing does protect the innards of an amp, as 6" of bubblewrap will cushion any impacts and reduce the forces experienced by the amp. This principle is well-understood in car design.

There's only so far you can go. If it gets really dropped, no amount of packaging will stop transformers bending a chassis, cabinets being split or speaker magnets shifting. Same with cars, really. People still die in crashes when the speeds are high enough.

It depends on the amp up to a point, of course. I wouldn't ship my Trem-o-verb, but I'd happily ship my little Peavey… although when I got it, I still had to straighten the chassis under the mains transformer. It didn't stop it working but it had clearly been dropped a long way at some time.

lustycourtier

martinw said:

Richardj said:

  Is it true (as I seem to hear quite a lot) that a modern tube amp isn't capable of being transported anywhere?

No.

Where have you heard that?

(It's 'valve amp' by the way   I'll forgive you if you are American)

I have a friend, a young guitarist in early 20s who is convinced that modern voxes are ungiggable and everyone on the internet agrees. his one experience is running his brand new one WIDE OPEN with a Cornish treble booster, which detroyed the amp within minutes.

martinw

ICBM said:

martinw said:

I think the 'problem' with shipping is massively exaggerated by the self-selection process of anecdotal internet reporting.

Nobody goes on the net to report that their amp (or guitar) arrived successfully with no damage.

Agreed, but there are still enough incidents to make me avoid the idea on principle were possible, when there's even a small chance of damage which will make a sale worse than unprofitable.

martinw said:

Correct packing does protect the innards of an amp, as 6" of bubblewrap will cushion any impacts and reduce the forces experienced by the amp. This principle is well-understood in car design.

There's only so far you can go. If it gets really dropped, no amount of packaging will stop transformers bending a chassis, cabinets being split or speaker magnets shifting. Same with cars, really. People still die in crashes when the speeds are high enough.

It depends on the amp up to a point, of course. I wouldn't ship my Trem-o-verb, but I'd happily ship my little Peavey… although when I got it, I still had to straighten the chassis under the mains transformer. It didn't stop it working but it had clearly been dropped a long way at some time.

Oh, whatever.

ICBM

I should maybe take some pics of the Fender Super Twin I have here which TNT completely destroyed the cabinet of… and it *was* well-packed.

ESBlonde

I've gigged the same valve head for 3 decades. The only major failure I can recall was about 25 years ago when it bounced down the road loose in the back of an old transit van and one of the big capacitors came undone at one end. It does pay to have a spare valve of each kind to hand carefully wrapped and suitable spare fuses but that goes for any amp/gear. I can't remember that last time I changed a fuse or valve on a gig, Bloody pedal link cables and such are a bigger pain to my rig. In the last 4 years I've treated my amp to a decent fitted flight case. As long as it cools before getting shut inside it's all good.

martinw

ICBM said:

I should maybe take some pics of the Fender Super Twin I have here which TNT completely destroyed the cabinet of… and it *was* well-packed.

Yes, that would prove it.

ICBM

martinw said:

ICBM said:

I should maybe take some pics of the Fender Super Twin I have here which TNT completely destroyed the cabinet of… and it *was* well-packed.

Yes, that would prove it.

Well, it does prove there is *some* risk!

We both know that this amp has an unusually heavy chassis and a relatively weak cabinet (butt-jointed and nailed at the top corners, typical 70s-Fender style), but it was well packed, pretty much as you describe - perhaps not quite 6" of bubble wrap, but plenty - and it still got wrecked. From the damage I would say it fell from a height onto one corner, and the inertia of the chassis did the rest. I doubt more bubble wrap would have helped since the amp crushed it from the inside, and any more rigid material would simply increase the loading on the cabinet. There does come a point where the internal mass takes over and there's no more you can do.

So no, I would not ship one - or any other heavy amp with this sort of construction. If you really needed to, it would be best to ship the chassis separately from the cabinet.

Neil

I wonder how many valve amps arrive damaged from big warehouse type sellers like Thomann? 

impmann

More than you think...

ThePrettyDamned

p90fool said:

meltedbuzzbox;178420" said:

p90fool said:

I've had a plugged-in 50w Superlead miss my head by inches, smash through a closed window and bounce twice in a flowerbed two floors below after being launched at me be the irate girlfriend of a mate of mine.

After one EL34 was replaced it worked perfectly, and we gigged it for years after.



Fragile, my arse.





I hope you gave her a good hiding too

To be fair to her we were a terrible band, very loud, and we'd been smoking weed and playing all night (this was 30 years ago). I was horrified, but the amp's owner was crying with laughter on the floor.
Good times (I think)

I WANT TO SWAP LIVES

WILL YOU SWAP LIVES

Dave_Mc

martinw said:

I think the 'problem' with shipping is massively exaggerated by the self-selection process of anecdotal internet reporting.

Nobody goes on the net to report that their amp (or guitar) arrived successfully with no damage.

There probably is overeporting of the problems for the reasons you said, but at the same time I'd have said all those NGD and NAD threads would qualify as people going on the internet to report that their stuff has arrived safely (assuming it was sent to them by courier, which in some cases at least it is).

Fighting exaggeration with exaggeration? )

EDIT: I should add, I've never had anything turn up really damaged in the post (though admittedly I had a couple of dodgy Genz Benz amps and I'm no tech so I dunno if they were just faulty or damaged in transit... I didn't see any damage, though obviously that's not conclusive proof).

I'm always happiest when the parcel turns up and everything is fine, though. )