- Joined
- Jan 21, 2014
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- 55
I'm starting a new thread to maybe get some people in on the various mods that have been done over the years on Cobras. I'm in the middle of getting mine (a V5 I think, since it has the bias points in back) cleaned up, re-worked and and made into the killer amp I think it can be. When I bought mine used a couple of months ago, it was noisy as HELL, and very brittle.
So, I asked around and found a guy called "The Tone Doctor"[/U][/B]8:. I asked a bunch of questions and he assured me that he can do whatever we want. So far, he's proven to be VERY knowledgeable and easy to work with. Besides.....he's a great player and tone junkie in his own right! So, now we're going through the entire amp replacing all of the cheesy 1/8th watt resistors that China decided to skimp by using that could very well be the start of the problem. We're now using 1 watt resistors in their place. After that, he plans to add a choke and replace some or all of the little programmable chips that govern the gain structure. What he's found is, that these little buggers have to do with how the gain stage acts. I'm not exactly sure what they do specifically, but he is. But, 1 of the big problems of this amp in particular is, that when you roll down the volume knob of the guitar or the gain knob on the amp, it seems there's 2 sounds going on at the same time. It's as if there's a clean sound getting louder as the dirty sound fizzles into nasty oblivion. It's not very musical sounding. There is a series of chips on the diagram from Framus that are labeled "OK1-12". These seem to be the ones he's referring to on Page 2 of the following schematic. I just included the 1st 5 pages of the schematic, because that's what's pertinent to this post.