Connection woes and the happy surprise

The single worst enemy of any electrical system is the connection failure. Of all connection failure variants my worst enemy - and I suspect many of you as well - is the patchbay - whether cables themselves or their corroding connections. The second prize goes to the rotary switch which I have grown to hate with a vengeance.

But today was a happy surprise. Yet another patched channel sounded like a broken connection with a 6dB drop as usual with a fully balanced setup. I set out to do the usual debug round...

Turned out to be the first tired tube of my life! The 6dB drop was purely accidental and unrelated to anything. I have broken tubes by design error, a bad build, the wrong tube in the wrong place and so on. But after almost 15 years of servitude a tube in NewYorkDave MILA-1 had its sunset.

Thanks Tung-Sol 12AV7, it was nice having you around.  :'(  8)

But after almost 15 years of servitude a tube in NewYorkDave MILA-1 had its sunset.

Click to expand...

Gosh has it been that long?  I wish NYD's website was still up (haven't checked wayback).

I've been having almost non-stop patchbay woes. Had to clean connection several times. It's been especially happening on the channels I put a new build on so I ended up troubleshooting it for a long time for a problem that was patchbay related. So frustrating.