Carvin Stage Master 212

[nemesis777]

Hello everyone!
I just joined the forum and am in need of some help if you please

4 years ago I bought a Carvin Stage Master. It was and still is the only tube amp I own. However it only functioned for about a year. I always thought the gain was too mild even at high volumes but one time I moved it between our practice room to a gig and it seized functioning completely. Not even the ON led will turn on.

So it has spent the last 3 years collecting dust in a closet until tonight when I remembered I owned a tube amp

So I checked the fuse and the tubes. Fuse seems fine, I can still see the filament is fine and it doesn't make any noises when you shake it (maybe its dumb but thats how I check four faults in these kinds of things).

The EL34 tubes make some noise though, don't know if that is normal and the little 12AX7s seem fine. Nothing seems burned either. I suspect something got damaged on the drive home that day what do you think?

[newey]

Nemesis-

Hello and Welcome!

I always thought the gain was too mild even at high volumes but one time I moved it between our practice room to a gig and it seized functioning completely. Not even the ON led will turn on.

Sounds like it may have always had issues, which then became terminal at some point.

If you are getting no LED, that means (probably) that you are getting no power, meaning it's (probably) not the tubes.

The EL34 tubes make some noise though, don't know if that is normal and the little 12AX7s seem fine.

Was this before or after it stopped working entirely? IOW, do you mean that the tubes are lit up even though the power LED is not?

If the amp is now entirely "cold" when turned on, I'd recheck that fuse with a meter first- or simply swap the old one out for a new one. The fuse could be bad and you wouldn't necessarily see the fault (or hear anything).

Apart from that, if the fuse is good and you still have no power, then we'll need to await one or more of our resident amp gurus for further input.

[Runewalker]

I have one of these as well and had ... well, have .... a different problem with it, discussed here:

guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=Amps&thread=2703&page=1

also:

guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=Amps&action=print&thread=2702

This Carvin amp design has a number of manifestations. Hasselbrock (see below) told me that the StageMaster is the previous name of the current Belair model. There are some cross liniage design elements in the Valvemaster and VT50 as well. There were a couple of versions of StageMasters, one of which added a clean channel presence control. Mine is an earlier version without that feature. No big loss as the clean channel has plenty of treble.

Here is a link to a Belair track, of which there are numerous on UToob.

Inside it has an etched circuit board and the usual array of capictiors, resistors, etc, fairly compactly designed.

There is a guy named Hassebrock who I corresponded with who designed a number of mods for this lineage of Carvin amps. It actually is a smokin' little beast with his mods, some of which I performed (mostly the diode removals, which smoothed the distortion away from it stock rattiness). It has a superb clean sound. Plays well with boxes and modelers.

Here is Hassebrock's VT50 / Nomad / BelAir mod page:

hasserl.com/vt50_mods

Hassebrock has a musician page on soundclick where you can hear some of the mods, but they are not labeled --- so not sure how helpful that is.

www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=405914

At the time offered to conduct some of the mods for me. But he has a note a year ago that his travel schedule prevented that. Not sure if that changed.

[nemesis777]

well I think I will just replace the fuse first and see how it goes. The amp stays completely cold, maybe I should have mentioned that first

As for the mods, I stumbled upon that site yesterday looking for more info on the amp.. pretty interesting, heard some clips already and I would definitely love to try 'em once I get the amp running again. Do you guys think the modded amp could work well in a say.. garage rock band? ;D