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Removing Power Tubes in MC60??

kelsa

kelsa

Active Member
A guitar playing buddy has a high end Victoria amplifier that uses 4 power tubes. He normally uses only 2 to decrease the output to 18 watts. Apparantly the amp is wired to operate on 2 or 4 power tubes. My question is whether Mcintosh amps will also operate on less tubes. Can I remove one of the two 6550's in my MC60's and have them operate similar to MC30's?
 
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NO, will cause high level of distortion at all levels if you pull one half of a push pull pair, possibly could damage output transformer if done long term.
 
A mono amp that uses 4 output tubes has two tubes in parallel on each side of the output transformer...removing one on each side would make it just like a standard two-tube system although the impedance of the output trans. might not be quite right for the increased resistance of just the two tubes.

If there are just 2 push pull output tubes then I concur that it is not a good idea to just use one...especially in a high power amp using 6550's.
 
Thanks for the replies. Makes sense that in a two tube amp removing one half of the system would cause distortion.
 
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