Laney VC15-110

The complaint of this tube amp is it had lost a lot of treble. This is my first time confronting a Laney VC15-110.
I plug in a guitar to hear closely what was described by the owner. I pushed the bright switch. Yes, it does engage and disengage accordingly. I played with the treble and tone knob. Yes, they both responded accordingly. According to my ears, no noticeable treble lost so far. However, there are trailing popping sound when the reverb is open. The more the reverb, the more the popping sound trailing and decaying after. There's no pop disturbance when the reverb is shut off. Cold solder perhaps?

I open it up to do some spot soldering. There are three PCB board inside. A tone control board, a tubes preamp and power supply board, and digital reverb board with send/return, speaker output occupying a little portion of it.

There's a lot of connectors coming and going between a three PCB. I bet under operation, the electron in circuit must be very busy going back and forth. Accident could happen? Most of the connectors has the same amount of pins. To avoid miss plugging any of the connectors to the wrong receptor, I mark them with marker pen. Not all, only those that I know I would plug them wrong if I didn't.

I decided to do a full soldering instead. I saw a lot of potential cold solder on tone control and the tube board. The reverb PCB receive some solder here and there.

I also did a full PCB clean up and nipping all long leads/legs protruding out on all three PCB's. The picture below was before nipping. There was no sign of treble lost as far as I tested it after. Sound exactly the same as before. Hmmm..My ears is functioning well I hope. Digital reverb still has pop though.

Conclusion.

Construction/Assembly wise, I am deeply dissatisfied with the screw used to fasten all the tube sockets to chassis. I don't think I've seen tapered screws like shown. I know they exist in plumbing world.

From the looks of it, it appear as if it used to have thread but got chewed off as soon as it gets fasten. Now these screws are meant to hold the tube sockets. When socket gets loose then the fatigue would be pass to the solder pads and eventually to the main PCB itself. I have to say I'm appalled by this. What else was done sub-par in there that we don't know about? All the screws were replaced to the one (steel finish) shown in the picture. I believe its M3 size.

Most of the female connector was poorly assemble, it is as if were assemble/inserted with gorilla force. A lot of the connectors’ pins were pushed in too deep sticking out to the other side of the PCB. Laney should re-train their contracted manufacturer about proper handling and assembly of electronic components. The passive component legs too weren't cut short as they should. Did they gave this VC15 build contract to a motorcycle factory? I don't know, but it did look like it came out from one.

Coming back to the reverb popping issues. I believe the reverb engine is the FV-1 chip by spinsemi. I don't think Laney has any involvement in it other than design and merged circuit arrangement rights. I thought of trying to fix it but I decided to forsook it as I found a website (yes only one) selling a complete Laney reverb PCB. Looks a direct drop in replacement. Not immediately available though. This normally can mean two things for the stock PCB. One - It's impossible or expensive to repair the board. Two - the stock board was poorly design and known to be defective after passing a certain mileage hours.

This amp has yet to reach its 10th birthday and it's already has a faulty reverb. I know many spring reverb amps that still works after 25 years of service. I bought a 90’s Laney GC30 solid state amp in 2015. The reverb in that works without a glitch. This is why I prefer spring over anything else!  I know cost efficiency approaches is the pillar of any manufacturing but what's the point of putting any new and cheap technology if the bloody thing would go burst in less than a decade. A free replacement or recall would've been appropriate if not a consolation for the end user. Is Laney confident they will have a returning customer? Maybe on clearance sales day, provided it's an impulse purchase. Keep up the good work.

You know what, I may write to Laney about this. See what their respond would be. If it's positive then I would do a part II. If there's none then I couldn't care less about such kind of ethics. I know ranting more that it is now won't bring back any reverb back to life, what more to the brand itself. So Caveat Emptor to my other client and to the readers of this blog.

This unit should came with a 10 inch "HH" loudspeaker. It spot a 10 inch Jensen instead. I guess Laney was finishing off the leftover Jensen into all early second generation. With that said. Timely catch by the amp owner.

There's actually two version of VC15 - 110. The first pre 2009 got the spring reverb, the post 2009 uses built-in Digital Reverb. Compare the under chassis below to know which version yours is.

Thank you
yustech