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Pete Academy
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I bought a used Markbass LMK head some time ago and have had major problems. It was tripping out mid song, and our sound engineer said the DI was noisy.

I sent it to Alberto at the UK HQ. He gave it a clean bill of health.

Last Sunday it tripped again. I have an important gig this coming Saturday and am quite nervous.

Anyone else had problems? I love the sound but am seriously concerned about Markbass's supposedly great reliability.

Edited by Pete Academy
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To be serious, my Markbass heads (I've owned three) tended to trip at certain venues and not at others. Read into that what you will, but it's probably a sign of quality, albeit slightly OTT and irritating when it happens.

C

EDIT previous post on the problem [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=53947&hl="]http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=53947&hl=[/url]

Edited by Beedster
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Don't know about the tripping out but the bass player on a tour I managed last year uses MarkBass - never had any problems except for DI'ing. For some reason they never seem to want to go through a DI box and engineers insist on putting them through them. Try going direct from amp to desk, always seemed to work for us despite everything the sound guys always tried to tell us.

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[quote name='Beedster' post='941264' date='Aug 31 2010, 07:23 PM']To be serious, my Markbass heads (I've owned three) tended to trip at certain venues and not at others. Read into that what you will, but it's probably a sign of quality, albeit slightly OTT and irritating when it happens.

C[/quote]

How often does this happen?

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I've never had mine cutout (bugger i probably shouldn't have said that) but I think that the DI is Post Pre-amp so our sound geek insists on taking my bass into the di box directly to the pa and I then take a link from the box to my amp, a CMD102p. So if it did cutout it'd still come out FOH.Which is reassuring I spose now that i've probably jinxed the next gig.

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[quote name='Pete Academy' post='941293' date='Aug 31 2010, 07:48 PM']Since I had the amp back it's been fine but seems to be clipping with my active bass. last Sunday I used my passive jazz, hit a note hard, and off it went. Turn it off and back on, and it's fine. I'm baffled. :)[/quote]


i had a dynacord class d power amp that did exactly that on one of the channels.. must be something digital amps do..

although some of the lower powered markbass heads have conventional power supplys (thats why some are SA and others SD... but i cant remember which yours was pete lol)

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[quote name='JMT3781' post='941327' date='Aug 31 2010, 08:13 PM']i had a dynacord class d power amp that did exactly that on one of the channels.. must be something digital amps do..

although some of the lower powered markbass heads have conventional power supplys (thats why some are SA and others SD... but i cant remember which yours was pete lol)[/quote]

Mine's a standard LMK model.

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[quote name='Musicman20' post='941337' date='Aug 31 2010, 08:20 PM']Hmm, strange one this.

Have you asked on talkbass?

Seems weird. Have you tried other basses/cables/everything else?[/quote]

The amp's been fine, but last gig I hit a big note and off it went. Tripped off, I turned it back on and it was fine.

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<anti-jinxing spell>My CMD121H has been fine for 4 years. The LMK/II/III don't have Class D stages, they are SS analogue amps with switched-mode power supplies. I have my suspicions about them with regards to impedance, they don't seem to like any messing on that front. My DI seems to be fine, or not, depending on the soundman...

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[quote name='Telebass' post='941445' date='Aug 31 2010, 09:34 PM']<anti-jinxing spell>My CMD121H has been fine for 4 years. The LMK/II/III don't have Class D stages, they are SS analogue amps with switched-mode power supplies. I have my suspicions about them with regards to impedance, they don't seem to like any messing on that front. My DI seems to be fine, or not, depending on the soundman...[/quote]

I'm picking a brand new tube800 up next week from the shop, it says the amp is digital over the analogue tube500 model so will that avoid said issue?

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For the past year or so I've seen the occasional post on TalkBass re Class D/SMPS bass amps shutting down (dropping into protection mode) in response to an out-of-spec AC supply. They do so to keep themselves from being damaged.

These few & far between posts have involved micro amps made by Carvin, Markbass, Gallien-Krueger, and recently, Genz-Benz (please read from [url="http://www.talkbass.com/forum/showpost.php?p=9506382&postcount=83"]post #83[/url] onwards).

To clarify, I'm not slagging these tiny light-weight wonders, but I will say this: I gigged a [url="http://www.traynoramps.com/products.asp?type=11&cat=66&id=394#mono2"]Traynor MONO Block II[/url] for [i]years[/i] and the [i]only[/i] time it ever quit on stage was when a venue experienced a power blackout.

If one is playing gigs where good power is assured then Class D/SMPS amps are fine.

If one is playing gigs which have iffy power then amps which employ more conventional power supplies may be a better option.

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I thought Tonka trucks were meant to be big and strong.

Certainly a strange one. I'm still not sold on these little amps and reading this does nothing to persuade me. Hope that you manage to get it sorted Pete... having equipment you can't trust is a right ball ache. Get it back to MarkBass although I am betting you aren't really going to get anywhere. I'm guessing this is a gremlin amp... short of replacing the pre and power circuits (and I'm guessing that's not going to be done in a hurry), I don't know how you are going to fix this one. What you could do with is the amp giving up terminally. It gives the service departments something to go on. These intermittent faults are always the worst to diagnose and fix. As crap as it may be, maybe its time to find an alternative and make this your backup amp...

Best of luck sorting it out.

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Left of field thought - could one of your cabs be shorting out under high excursion?

MB stuff definitely is Italian - in that it looks after its own first and foremost. If there is an issue with impedance in the load its driving it will shutdown, if the fan stops or is impeded and it gets too hot, it will shut down, if the AC is crap it wll shut down. If it has an internal fault it will shut down, but MB are good at finding this and rectiying it (it does them no favours at all to have a customer moaning about their amp cutting out, and they really seem to get that, judging by the vast majority of happy posts I've read). So if you sent it to them and they said its fine then I would look elsewhere in the signal chain or power supply to try and work out what is causing the issue.

Is it only in a particular venue?

Have you tried different cabs and or leads?

Touching something from a tree here, and whatever else one must do to ward off the curse of Murray Walker, but I've not experienced a problem myself yet with my SA450, I've just read a vast amount of peoples experiences with their MB products. Oh and the confusion many live engineers experience wrt MB heads is the DI is at line level, balanced, from an XLR out, which they assume is therefoe at mic level, and then complain that its very high gain and or unbelievably noisy (when they try running at mic level).

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[quote name='Pete Academy' post='941347' date='Aug 31 2010, 08:27 PM']The amp's been fine, but last gig I hit a big note and off it went. Tripped off, I turned it back on and it was fine.[/quote]

I think ive mentioned it before but ive experienced this. It was at a rehearsal studio where i was using thier cab. Every time i tried to slap (ok, i know i shouldn't but i was bored) or dig in my SA450 would trip. 3 or 4 times it happened. I plugged in to another cab and it never happened again.
It was definitely the cab as afterwards i was told the cab was faulty (cheers for telling me after the event)

Ive done around 250 gigs with my two MB heads and never had them trip so i dont think its a bad design as such.

Edited by dave_bass5
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