| Not sure if it's a fluke, Bob. A friend of mine had a Polytone and
gave him nothing but *grief* until he finally decided to dump it.
Also, I don't think that I can ever recall hearing any "good" things
about Polytones. Only bad things!
Sorry! But it doesn't sound like you got a lemon (or 3 of them), but
instead, an engineers nightmare.
FWIW,
cheers/mike
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| My Polytone Baby Brute was DOA when I received it ten years ago. The
day it arrived, I was going to do some recording and stupidly took it
with me without testing it first. Since I was desperate, I disassembled
it at the studio and found the external speaker jack wires were
shorted, so I cut them out. Then I found the speaker protection mesh
was rattling, so I ripped it off.
It's been working fine ever since!!! :-):-).
I wrote a rather hostile letter to Polytone, who called me to apologize
and offered to repair the unit and extend my warranty. I never bothered
to send it to them.
My MB IV is five years old, has moderate amount of use and has not had
any problems. I generally only use these for rehearsals and recording,
so I couldn't say how they hold up under serious gigging. Most of the
Polytone users I know have been happy with them. I like them because
they sound good for their weight, but, because of my first experience,
I'm not sure about Polytone's quality control.
When I do * serious * (;-)) playing, I use Fender.
Danny W.
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|
My personal opinion from a hardware design viewpoint is that
the problems you've described are potentially connector problems from
what I know of the insides. One of which you mention(no reverb)happened to
my MBII. It turned out to be a broken wire at a reverb pan jack. It took me
15 minutes to fix. As far as any smokey experiances,I've had none.
For a lightweight practice amp or for occasional jam session or
recording session they work fine. I've used mine for a monitor amp with my
Mesa preamp...A keyboard player I was playing with used it for amp for a
couple of practices.
I also had the screen covering the speaker and I ended up taking it
off and restapling back on so it was tight across the speaker.
So I'd say the amp has held up pretty adequately for what it is.
As far as servicing them? they are no big deal to fix,most of the
parts are off the shelf.....And schematics are available. They are probably
the most basic solid state amp you can buy today....
Rick
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