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- Feb 23, 2016
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I first purchased a 2nd hand VTL just months after Manly moved from the UK to California. Mine was number 57 of their Cali production. After a couple months it went kabang!!! Not as in kabang over the speakers, but as in kabang in the amp. Two of the tubes filled with electrical arcing and then smoking and then the fuses popped. Safe since it had fuses. Well while not happy it did have a lifetime warranty.check this, go to 2:06...! there is a God...
best
Lorenzo
When I called I initially talked to David himself, who apologized and said they'd fix it and cover all shipping both ways the whole works. He turns me over to someone to arrange shipping. Someone for whom English was a 2nd language and obviously a pretty new employee. We get thru that and I send it in. So taking out time needed for shipping, they got it one day and fixed it shipping it back the next.
It arrives, I open it look it over and connect it up. I hit the power switch and CRACK!!!!!!! The sound of an electrical arc. They had replaced all the tubes gratis and then this. So I'm wondering if the new tubes could be damaged etc. etc. It would crack like that each time you turned it on. I didn't know much about electronics then. I studied mechanical engineering and electrical stuff was voo doo to me.
David was very apologetic, and asked me to pull the bottom cover. I could see where the arcing was occurring. He once again had me ship it back and covered everything. Turned me over to the lady again for shipping arrangements. Her English was much better in the intervening couple of weeks. She calls me this time to remind me it would be arriving the following day, and what by now was a month she hardly had any accent at all.
A friend was over the day it arrived and I was mentioning how good her English had become in a few weeks. When I turned the amp on and everything worked perfectly my friend said, "lucky for you her ability to repair amps has gotten better too! You know that little outfit is David Manley, his son and this lady you talked to." Maybe he was right, seemed funny at the time.
It was an important event. These were all black boxes of magic to me. Having seen how little was in his amp, I decided it couldn't be too hard to learn at least a little about electronics. The following year I taught myself quite a bit. About then my employer was happy to help get me training as many of the things I was working with now had extensive electronic instrumentation and control. That is how I came to learn what I know about electronics. Sort of because my VTL amp was iffy as simple as it was. They still were/are very good amps IMO. I used them for many years after that.