tubes and analog

One of the biggest fears a manufacturer has is that of a used piece of their gear appearing on the market after having been improperly modded.

I've become quite friendly with Mike Sanders of Quicksilver Audio.

Mike is one of the quintissential examples of bullet-proof designs in terms of stability and reliability.

Some of the Quickies he sees returned to him for "minor repair" are not to be believed.

He finds so much unauthorized work having been done on his gear to "improve" it, that the poor unsuspecting purchaser is faced with seeing more work being required to rip out the guts and start from scratch than what would be involved in starting from a bare chassis.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

Well, the amp didn't exactly "blow up", but because of the wrong fuses it did take out a speaker(woofer) and I doubt Spencer wanted to continue using it until he tracked down the problem. I thought Spencer's explanation revealed clearly why Raul thought what he did and is understandable. The good thing is that this is not representative of Atma's - because someone had installed the wrong fuses - and explains why Ralph and others didn't believe it. I'm assuming nobody except Spencer knew the real story and from all outward appearances it looked like the Atma's had done something terribly wrong. Thankfully, a properly fused Atma should never exhibit this behavior and I think any rational person would admit that installing the wrong fuses in an amp is likely going to lead to problems that are not inherent to the design and could lead one to think there is something wrong with the amp. So shouldn't this be chalked up as a misunderstanding? It seems to me that Ralphs amps were not at fault and Raul witnessed something that appeared like it was. I imagine they both now understand what happened.

Yes, Mab33 and Carlbecker, I think you guys have summed it up nicely. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect a used pair of well-cared for amps, carefully packed, sold to me w/extra driver tubes, etc. would come to me loaded with the wrong valued fuses.
Docsavage, I think you are being a bit harsh on Raul, as he drew a reasonable conclusion from what he witnessed. If Ralph hadn't later mentioned to me the idea of confirming fuse value, I might not have caught it for a while.
I apologize to the original poster for contributing to driving this thread further off track! Cheers,
Spencer

Got that right!

I agree that Raul's integrity should not be held in question based on this misinterpretation or misunderstanding or whatever it was.