CJ said:
Peavey has the est wave soldering i have seen in an amp, who ever set up the tanks knew what they were doing,
Thats an interesting compliment? I don't know what tanks you are thinking of but there may be a trim for height of the wave... too high and liquid solder can spill on top of a sagging PCB making a serious mess.. Boards like that go through the wave the narrow way (less sag) and sometimes wide boards get stiffeners clipped on to prevent/reduce sag...
The PCB design has a lot to do with solder integrity as well as several other process related factors (solder temperature, composition, flux, board preheaters, feed speed, etc). High volume layouts can even factor in direction of board movement through the wave to reduce solder bridges that require expensive manual rework.
I notice that a bunch of traces in the power amp section do not have solder mask on them... the extra solder is left there on purpose to reduce trace resistance. Doing that to the entire board would waste solder that cost money, but widely done on Peavey power amps (cheaper than heavier copper).
I am pretty sure there is 100% inspection and hand touch up on boards with that many parts before going on to final assembly (that may be in different buildings). The wave soldering and machine assembly area was in Decatur (near where I still live) and the guitar amp was likely final assembled on a production line in Meridian (20+ miles away).
I was surprised to learn that Peavey put a BBD inside a guitar amp... (they didn't even call me...
). The Adverb chips from Peavey's digital group is less surprising to see. I won't speculate how they sounded but replacing springs was a long time desire of Hartley's. I was saddled with some similar digital efx in powered mixers from my group and we made them work. :
One trick I did was to take the digital overload output designed to light an LED so the operator would reduce the input level (probably some internal digital accumulator overflow flag??). Instead of lighting an LED I used the overload line to trigger a JFET shunt limiter, reducing the input level but only as needed. The different reverb algorithms had widely varying headroom so this helped a bunch and was pretty much invisible to the end users.
JR