idyllthot
TDPRI Member
A year ago I bought a open box special 68 Princeton reverb reissue from Sweetwater. It is an amp that I have been wanting for 10 years and I had never played one before. At volumes one to three the amp sounded fantastic. Clean the Reverb was springy as I could ever need and the tremolo could go from non-existent to extreme. Volumes above three were unusable the hum was so loud so I would use pedals to get a crunchy tone but it was never right to my ears. Last weekend I had to move my amp to a different room in my house and in the new location the hum was so bad even from volume one I was picking up sounds through the factory jj tubes from random signals (these tubes are quite microphonic). Then I remembered that I had a dedicated amp circuit for an electric fireplace installed so I moved the amp over there and plugged it in and there was no hum dead silent turn the amp all the way up to eight nothing just pure clean fender tones as loud as I wanted them. So I moved my amp back to where it was originally and I put it on its own dedicated circuit and now I can play it at any volume. The next problem is that I found that the volumes I tend to like where the amp breaks up start at a little over 5 to about 8 and that's way too loud for comfort. So I used some store credits and some cash and bought a Tone King Ironman ii mini attenuator and now I run that and all I need is my 51 vintage ii tele, my 68 Princeton reissue my tone King attenuator some Reverb and tremolo dialed to taste and I'm in heaven. Moral of the story I'm glad I bought good equipment I'm glad that I stuck it out and finally discovered the cause of the sound in my amp was due to ground loops that a dedicated circuit would fix and a good tele and attenuator with a Princeton Running at volume eight is the most glorious sound a man could hear.
