glowing red output tube, but don't think it's red-plating


Hello auidionaughts.  Had an interesting circumstance last night; output from the right monoblock began to sound slow and of lower output.  Line of sight to the tubes (both input and output) are largely blocked from the listening seating position by a ginormous power transformer and an equally sized output stage inductor, so neither me or mrs. x immediately noticed that the plates on tube #3 were glowing red...but the change in output got our attention.  I jumped up to check it out and found tube #3 as described; of course I turned the amp off. 

Inspecting the tube this morning, it shows two anomalies: silver plating on the inside of the glass opposite the ridges that hold the support rods and a very small amplitude dimple in the glass roughly centered within the two fields of the aforementioned silver plating.  All else looks normal including the silver plating on the top of the tube which looks unchanged, even though I am guessing that was the source of the silver plating now on the sides of the tube.  Could it have come from somewhere else?

During the incident, it didn't look like red-plating to me; i.e. not red at the right angle crease in the plate, rather, the whole plate was red.  Oddly, every other tube failure with these amps was fast, taking out a bias resistor and fuse and sometimes breaking the glass.  Neither of these happened with this failure and it was slow.  Was able to replace the tube and slightly adjust the bias and away we go again, so now resistor or fuse damage.  I did (stupidly) turn the bias pot down before installing the new tube ( I know doing so is good practice, but doing it removed a potentially informative data point), so can't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that the bias was spot on where it is supposed to be (40 mA), or very close, when the failure happened.  My understanding is that red-plating is due to incorrect bias.

Any ideas what caused this failure? 

xenolith

@xenolith 

Red is usually a bad thing when it comes to tubes and I’m guessing that for what ever reason, that tube needs replacing.  A simple test would be to replace it with whatever you have laying around and see if the output gets better. The beauty of having individual pots is that you can bias the replacement so it sounds pretty much like the others.

All the best.

@curiousjim - all is well now.  The tube in question was just announcing it's demise.  I intend to be much less dramatic with my own.  A new tube, a quick bias routine and we're cooking with gas again.  Really cranked it last night and both amps where singing beautifully.  If I had any pride I'd be embarresed by my silly question, but happily I don't, so I'm not. 

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that you're a former (current?) Dodd 120 amps owner; if I'm right about that and you read this, I'd appreciate knowing what you think (thought) of them and if you've replaced them, what you replaced them which, why you replaced them with what you did and what you think of what you replaced them which.  

@xenolith 

Glad to hear it was an easy fix.

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that you're a former (current?) Dodd 120 amps owner;

You must be thinking of some other guy.  I’ve never owned Dodd.