Peavey T Max help..

[Zed Twenty Ate]

So i am new here and i am looking for some help. I recently purchased a used T max Peavey head. The head sounds great but it doesnt seem really loud. I have to crank the thing all the way up to get decent volume. If i keep the gain down i have to crank the volume and if i turn the gain up the DDT clip light stays red. My assumption is that red is bad...

I am running a peavey 4 10 tx and an ampeg 4 10 that my friend let me borrow. They are both 8 ohms so running together i should be running 4 ohms.

Any ideas?

 

[butchblack]

Gain and volume work hand in hand. Try setting your gain about ¾ and adjusting the volume from there. Adjust the gain if the clipping light stays on. An occasional clip is ok. Start with your tones ½ and adjust to get the tone you want. Also, if you have it on your amp make sure you're going through the passive not active input jack or the -db button isn't on.

How loud are you trying to go? That set up should be plenty loud. If you're still not getting enough volume take the amp to an amp repairman, have him put it on an oscilloscope to check the power output.

 

[Zed Twenty Ate]

Im not looking for super crazy loud...i am just looking to hear myself over my drummer and guitarist. Both of my basses are active so i would assume i should have the active switch enabled right? Also does anyone know about that red ddt light? Am i damaging anything by having that flashing when i play hard?

One more thing...does this thing have an actual tube?

 

[synterx]

one tube in the preamp section, that's it. Set your EQ perfectly flat, or turn off the eq with the button. Put your bass and high knobs straight up at 12:00. You do not have to engage the active button if you don't want to. Some basses, even active ones work better without the switch on.

The whole key to setting the Gain knob and Volume knob is to set the gain first. Don't worry about the volume knob. The gain knob is supposed to let you match your bass to the amp properly. I start at 12:00 on the gain knob, and then use the Master Volume to see if I get loud enough. Only then do I start changing the gain based on what the DDT light does. It can blink once in awhile on hard notes, it's supposed to do that.

Bottom line, you are pushing 350 watts into those two cabinets. Not the ideal amount of juice. Peavey's heads before the new Tour models all were optimized around using one or two 4 ohm cabs, not 8 ohms. Peavey's cabs mainly came in 4 ohms, so you'd be pushing the T max into 2 ohms when using 2 cabinets. They've since changed their format to what most other amps are nowadays, 4 ohms with two 8 ohm cabs.

My 410TX and TVX cabinets were fairly mid-shy. I had to crank the mids up via EQ to get a good hearable tone live.

Keep everything flat to start, boost your mids up little, and see where you stand.