Draining The Caps

[CoreyT]

I remember bangin' on the side of old tube TVs

I have read that it is not good to turn on a tube head with no cable running to the speaker cab.
I always have a cable plugged to the cab from the head.
What will happen, and will it hurt it every time if one forgets to have a cable in place?

 

[Em7]

I remember bangin' on the side of old tube TVs

I have read that it is not good to turn on a tube head with no cable running to the speaker cab.
I always have a cable plugged to the cab from the head.
What will happen, and will it hurt it every time if one forgets to have a cable in place?

It depends on amp wattage and how robustly an amp is built, but smoke followed by an expensive repair is the usual result of failing to plug a speaker load into the back of most gig-size tube amps. The speaker is part of the output circuit.

 

[László]

It's an outmoded tradition that was started by Leo Fender and copied by many other manufacturers. You and I are both old enough to remember tube-type consumer electronics. How many tube-type HI-FI amps or TVs in the fifties and sixties came with standby switches? How about "All American Five" tube-type table radios?

When I was a little girl, car radios had tubes. You could crank them up and they'd distort like a guitar amp. One speaker in the middle of the dash, AM radio. The speakers were horrible sounding, and the combination of a crappy speaker and rock and roll song cranked to distortion? Perfection!

I also used rotary dial telephones, and rode in cars without seatbelts.

But now I'm an old, crotchety man and I use standby switches because I dig traditions that died before the world was born.