I've noticed that too. They are excellent amps but that doesn't mean they don't show up from time to time.
I used them as my reference amp for nearly three years and the excellent thing about them is reliability. Lots of tube amps sound decent, but big tube amps have a bad habit of blowing resistors (or worse) when they fail.
Wolcotts generally refuse to work in one of three ways.
(1) Turn the amp on and an output tube is out of bias range or bad, it refuses to use (only) THAT tube and the LED in front of it does not glow.
(2) Refuses to come out of safety. No sound until you remove the bad input tube.
(3) Has a nasty output tube failure while making loud music, then it blows the fuse. Put in a new fuse, cycle it back on and the bad tube (heater working-glowing or not), the blue light in front of it fails to come on, meaning THAT tube failed.
If the more efficient Soundlab panels had come out sooner, I would have kept mine. It's nice to have something that is user friendly and does not require a screwdriver or meter to keep it perfectly biased. It does it automatically every time you turn it on.
Should have mentioned the obvious. They sound excellent.
I used them as my reference amp for nearly three years and the excellent thing about them is reliability. Lots of tube amps sound decent, but big tube amps have a bad habit of blowing resistors (or worse) when they fail.
Wolcotts generally refuse to work in one of three ways.
(1) Turn the amp on and an output tube is out of bias range or bad, it refuses to use (only) THAT tube and the LED in front of it does not glow.
(2) Refuses to come out of safety. No sound until you remove the bad input tube.
(3) Has a nasty output tube failure while making loud music, then it blows the fuse. Put in a new fuse, cycle it back on and the bad tube (heater working-glowing or not), the blue light in front of it fails to come on, meaning THAT tube failed.
If the more efficient Soundlab panels had come out sooner, I would have kept mine. It's nice to have something that is user friendly and does not require a screwdriver or meter to keep it perfectly biased. It does it automatically every time you turn it on.
Should have mentioned the obvious. They sound excellent.