Antique Sound Lab Hurricane Problem

>>Clearly a regular occurance in the life of this amp<<
In that case you have a flawed design. Burned out resistors or caps should not be a regular occurrence in any amplifier. All of course IMO

==In that case you have a flawed design. Burned out resistors==

Probably. I don't know if it is unusual for high power tube amplifiers to use sacrificial resistors to protect itself against failed tubes, but I certanily never had it happened in other tube amps I owned.

On the other hand it is a simple fix and the rest of the amplifier is intact.

If this doesn't happen too often, than this is not so bad. I suspect the wide bias range allowed owners to set the bias too high, resulting in a tube smoking. In my case, I suspect that I replaced the tubes in the wrong sockets, resulting in inadvertant high bias at that socket.

MANY tubed poweramps consume a resistor when a tube shorts, and I've replaced a few. That's why conrad-johnson and other manufacturers of tubed poweramps place fuses on the high-Voltage rail. You might consider having someone add those to your amps.
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==You might consider having someone add those to your amps.==

Sounds like a good idea. Since I am spending considerable amount of time inside the amps, I can probably add them myself soon.

I have found that I had a blown resistor in another socket, mascarading as a healthy one, because the meter wire was broken on that socket ! Without a signal, ASL meter just drifts down slowly from the previous value !

OK, so now all is working and they sound devine. Do other Hurricane owners have the same amount of trouble? Or do these guys stay stable after being fixed and carefully biased?

Any feedback from other owners is greatly appreciated. I am trying to decide if these amps are worth 2.5K. These are definitely the best amps I had ever heard and by a considerable margin. On the other hand I never had to do this much work, not even on my old Citation.

One should take note, however, that the latest version (beveled front sides, extruded case) have extensive reworking of the protection circuitry and the resistor issue seems to have been resolved.

Just like a first year car (& the associated bugs & recalls), ASL seems to be learning from earlier production errors and taking corrections accordingly.

Keep in mind that there just isn't anything else out there that can offer even CLOSE to the overall performance for anywhere near the price. Priced a pair of ARC VTM-200's lately? You'll see what I mean.

Despite my earlier statement, and admitting that I sold off my "2nd generation" version of the amps, they were overall, the best sounding amplification that I ever experienced in my system.

I would be open to purchasing the latest edition (with the updated revisions) despite the minor repair issues I had with the earlier version.

BTW -- rumor has it that they are coming out with a balanced/XLR input version (something I personally wanted to always see with this amp...)