Tube Questions - Audio Research Reference 5


Hello All,

I have an Audio Research Ref 5, recently, there has been some related noise ( am assuming ) at around 950 hours of use. It only affected the right channel. Ive ordered replacement tubes, but on the meantime replaced the 4 linestage 6H30 Solvtek Tubes with the ElectroHarmonix Gold Plated Version. The 2 tubes in the power stage remained the same. There was some improvement, but it seems the bass is still rolling off on the right channel. I had a few questions:

1. What does a bad tube in the powerstage VS linestage sound like?

2. Is it possible that a bad tube on a REF 5 in the powerstage can affect only 1 channel?

Thanks in advance for your help.
shanghait

Showing 2 responses by shanghait

Dear Cmalak,

In a way I did eliminate them as sources of the problems. Below were my tests and outcomes..

When I first identified this problem the scratchy noise was quite loud in the one speaker, and the sound of the music was not like before. The bad channel seems less full, less bass, tinny sounding.

Here are some of the things I did:
1. Switched XLRs coming out of the amp: Sound moved to other channel.
2. Turned Power off, then on again on Preamp: This removed about half of the scratching noise, but sound of the music was still not the same.
3. Replaced the tubes on the output stage with the EH: No more scratchy noise, but music still sounds less full.
4. Swapped Preamps to the Bel Canto Pre 3, sound is more balanced between channels.

Theo,
Thanks. I had also tried that too before I switched to the EH/s The scratchy sound was hard to replicate 100% of the time when switching out the stock tubes. It seems when I simply turned the power off, the scratchiness would go away, but slowly come back.
The one thing I have not done is switch the 2 tubes in the power stage. Thats why I was wondering if anyone knew the answers to the 2 questions posted above.

Thanks.