edfardos

remove the inner pair of power tubes, then try.   if it still does it, put them back, then remove the outter tubes.  If you have a bad tube, this test will find it.  My HD100 had an arcing tube, which happened to be in the inner pair.   swapped them both, works great.

--edfardos

Pink light in a tube typically means it has air in it (cracked).   all tubes pink?  that seems unlikely.

The Line6 Spider MkII editor looks great, but I'd rather quit playing my guitar than install Microsoft windows just for this (and no, it doens't work in Wine).

I can easily send/receive patches by simply cat'ing /dev/snd/midiC0D0 and hitting "dump-current" on the Spider amp.  But, unfortunately Line6 decided to obfuscate the patch in the sve file. 

Here's a .sve patch found in the forums:

00000000   53 56 45 50  00 00 00 03  7D 01 00 24  01 03 00 00  SVEP....}..$....

On my hd100 with four power tubes, i've removed the inner two tubes for an aparent 15% volume reduction. Be sure to rebias the amp if you do.

If you replaced the tubes then the amp needs to be rebiased. If you dont the idle current will be higher in some tubes, possibly making them hotter. Have it done by a tech unless you are used to working around lethal voltages even when its unplugged. Itll sound better too with no crossover distortion.

edfardos

Normally i set my channel volume around 12 oclock, but today, i cranked it to 5pm and expected it to simply increase the volume. What i discovered was that it also added significant overdrive, in a good way. Does the channel volume saturate the dsp, or the 12ax7 before the master volume? I'm wondering if my hd100 is somehow broken, or worse, if i replace a bad tube if this behavior will change.

could somebody set their mk2 valve to twang-amber with drive at 2pm, then max out the channel volume and se if it adds more distortion and overdrive? (in addition to increased volume?). This is the most obvious scenario, other amp models dont really exhibit this behavior.

Thanks!

edfardos

Oh, and until there's a real Linux client, you can easily backup and restore individual patches like this:

You can even edit the patch names in a hex editor if ya like.  It'd be nice to know what the rest of the numbers mean in the sysex data, but, Line6 doesn't appear to want to support new operating environments like Linux.

--edfardos

I've got the Line6 Edit software (Spider MkII) running in wine, and there is some midi communication according to the analyzer, but it cannot send patches back and forth.  Other windows-midi software works fine, so I don't think it's my cables/setup.   Here's my notes, in case somebody wants to pickup the ball.  It appears to be opening the correct midi ports, but the Line6 software has no way of specifying a port, so make sure your first linux midi ports connect to your device.