BVV3000 INFINIUM Trial

[timv]

Yeah the cost of these makes them interesting for hotrodding. I know the old local company krank originally started by modding old sovtek heads.

The price I paid it was worth it to me. My first plan is to try and repair it to work with infinium and everything working. Would be fun to take measurements and figure out what it is all doing.

Worst case is the amp won't work because of a failure in the specialized circuitry so my back up plan is to set it up as a standard biased amp.

I only paid $55 for it plus shipping so I am not into it for much at all.

Reading this and other threads I am wondering if it is going to be a simple fix that another tech missed. Looks like most issues so far are blown tubes causing blown fuses and/or resistors.

I shall see what's up soon.

 

[Lindex]

Yes, might be interesting to see what is possible with this head w/o Infinium.
As I heard, Infinium runs the tubes quite cold to maximise their lifespan, so it might pretty well be the case that it really can start to bite and scream with the tubes running more on the hot side.

Looking forward to your findings either way!

 

[seamonkey]

Yes, might be interesting to see what is possible with this head w/o Infinium.
As I heard, Infinium runs the tubes quite cold to maximise their lifespan, so it might pretty well be the case that it really can start to bite and scream with the tubes running more on the hot side.

Looking forward to your findings either way!

Or even another way, they gave up "High Fidelity" for "Long Life". This amp could be a louder cleaner with a mod.

 

[timv]

Well got the amp last night. Unpacked it and checked it out a little real quick. Plugged it in and turned on power, good it turns on, tubes light up. Thats all I did last night.

This morning I removed the preamp and power amp from chassis and poked around checking fuses and looking for anything blown, no obvious problems. I powered it up with no tubes installed and checked voltages, all good. Then turned it off standby and checked voltages, still good. B+ comes up to around 640 with no tubes, screen voltages there, bias voltage, everything.

All right, lets install the tubes. I put in the driver tubes and one pair of 6550's, one push, one pull. Hooked up speaker. Turned it on and out of standby and no fault lights. Turned up volume and got the normal amp hum/hiss. Adjusted the pots and everything does what it should. Left it on for about 5 minutes and than it went into fault mode. The infinium lights pointed out 5 bad tubes, the 4 that weren't installed and one of the ones I installed. I replaced that one "bad" tube with another. Turned it back on and it sat and idled for 20+ minutes with no issues. Checked voltages and all good.

The sockets with no tubes installed has -67volts for bias, the ones with tubes were about -48volts. The infinium is doing its thing. The 4 missing tubes were lit up on the back.

I had to go to work then so I will continue testing and will check all the tubes sent to me in my tube testers and another amp to check bias. I'll try to figure out the limits of the auto-biasing and see where it calls a tube "bad".

 

[timv]

Well, looks like yesterday morning I happened to put the two tubes in the only two sockets that want to work correctly...

Tube #5 which is the one that originally showed a problem, keeps biasing the tube @ 100ma which is way too high, this is @ a B+ around 600volts. The two that seem to constantly work correctly will bias the tubes installed in them @ around 45-50ma which is a good number. The other 3 sockets will not bias @ all, the current stays right around 0 up to maybe 2-3ma.

All components on the power tube board are fine, all connections are fine. With no tubes installed all pins measure an appropriate voltage. I started to reverse engineer the schematic and figure out where the infinium interacts and have the 2 cables that go to the power tube board sort of figured out. I'll troubleshoot around a bit more as is but am thinking now that the infinium will be getting ripped out. There is one sign of a damaged surface mount cap on the infinium board and that relates to tube 5, I think.

I need to trace out all the connections from the infinium board and see how it interacts other places in the amp, most likely have to bypass the startup circuit relay components and other fun items.

The power tube board component values are very similar to an SVT but not quite the same. The traces are very hard to follow because the circuit board and traces are all black. Having a better time guessing and ohming out to see where the traces go.

I'm not going to try and purchase a new infinium board or anything like that, I have barely any money into this and plan to keep it that way. If they happen to still read this thread and ask for me to send it to them, I gladly will so they could have some data.

 

[Mr. Foxen]

The 190 Infiniums are a great modding platforms, the pre and power sections are separate boards, gives you a lot of space to lose the whole pre and assemble your own, and leave the power section with its clever bits in place.

These jobs laid out like an SVT?

 

[Sparky Mark]

I wonder how many of these BVV3000 infinium heads have been made and are out there working? Mine was made in 2012 but still unopened until I bought it a few weeks back. Tube auto bias is established in the audiophile world and Bugera infinium equipped guitar amps possibly outsell this amp tenfold so if it really didn't work we should be able to find a fair amount of fault reports.

 

[Mr. Foxen]

if it really didn't work we should be able to find a fair amount of fault reports.

Fairly sure there were plenty of reports of them having poor reliability before they were even released. Thanks internet.

 

[ebozzz]

Fairly sure there were plenty of reports of them having poor reliability before they were even released. Thanks internet.

I don't own the amp and have never tried it. I have done my share of searching for information about it. My search results did not reveal many negative comments about the amp's reliability. If I did find something that was problem related, it appeared to be more an issue of shipping related damage. Now, I freely admit that the search parameters that I used may very well have had a significant impact on the results that I received....

 

[timv]

Yeah I still need to dig deeper and make sure. I don't want to pull it out because it would be fun to me to figure out what it does, etc...

 

[seamonkey]

Maybe PM Bart and see if you can talk them out a schematic if you sign a Non-Disclosure
I don't quite understand why Bugera isn't more open with their schematics and designs. If someone wanted to reverse engineer it, it would happen regardless if the schematic was released.

 

[Mr. Foxen]

Probably don't want to encourage clueless tinkerers to do stuff that will spark themselves up.

 

[twinfallsbass]

Probably don't want to encourage clueless tinkerers to do stuff that will spark themselves up.

timv is more than capable of doing this

 

[Mr. Foxen]

timv is more than capable of doing this

One person doesn't make a rule for everyone that can access publicly available schematics.

 

[twinfallsbass]

One person doesn't make a rule for everyone that can access publicly available schematics.

Just dont think you should be throwing out the word " clueless " when you dont know the individual like I do,that's all. Like I said, timv is more than capable to work on these amps

 

[Mr. Foxen]

Just dont think you should be throwing out the word " clueless " when you dont know the individual like I do,that's all. Like I said, timv is more than capable to work on these amps

Again, that individual is not representative of the entire public.

 

[timv]

I actually think it will be kind of "fun" to figure it out on my own too.
I know a lot of companies don't release schematics until the amp isn'tade anymore so I understand them not being available.

 

[ebozzz]

Just dont think you should be throwing out the word " clueless " when you dont know the individual like I do,that's all. Like I said, timv is more than capable to work on these amps

I don't think that he was specifically targeting @timv when he made that statement. At least I didn't interpret it that way. I took it as if he were saying that Bugera was maybe trying to avoid an incident of some unqualified person hurting themselves. Not timv, someone unqualified...

 

[seamonkey]

Again, that individual is not representative of the entire public.

There are certain requirements on TB for IQ and hearing ability before you can post

 

[seamonkey]

I actually think it will be kind of "fun" to figure it out on my own too.
I know a lot of companies don't release schematics until the amp isn'tade anymore so I understand them not being available.

There are some absolutely amazing electronics tear down videos and tutorials showing some have figured out amazing complicated circuits. It's fun to see how much people can figure out, including hacking the code as I'm sure there's a CPU in the Infinium.