I just picked myself up a pair of MB-185 Sig. mono's that are about four years old. I am the third owner, and was able to pick them up directly from the second owner, who had used them with no problems for a year. I put them in my system last weekend, and they only played for about 3 hours before they both went dead simultaneously. The weird thing is, it was the B+ fuses that I think blew, because the heater filaments still light up, but only an AC line/AC fuse event could explain them going at the same time. Since then, I've left two messages for Luke with no response, and although I've talked to Bea twice, she isn't up on the technical issues. She did tell me, however, that the B+ fuses, which are 1 amp, 250 volt, slo-blo types in my amps, are now in current production changed to 1.5 amp, 600 volt, fast-blo types. This is more in line with the fusing I've seen used on other fine tube amps. I really have a hard time understanding why, at VTL, only the company owner and president (Luke) is the one supposed to deal with customer technical support issues. He's obviously much too busy to give me kind of support I've always had available to me from Conrad-Johnson, for instance. I'm going to try to replace these fuses with 1.5 amp, 250 volt, fast-blo's for the time being, since new fuse holders are required to fit the higher voltage replacements, but I'm very curious what could have caused this to happen in the first place, and whether it will happen again. (BTW, the rest of the system works fine with my old amp, and no power line event was noticable at the time of the failure.) As for the sound, it's too early for me to have formed a real opinion, but they did seem big and powerful with good transparency, but somewhat dark and lacking in sparkle and air, and a little looser in the bass than I was expecting, but these may need fresh tubes. Anybody done the cap upgrade here?
