Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Although I have owned a '65 Vox AC30 for twenty-five years I have rarely ever plugged it in. Last week I bought a new AC30 Custom Classic head on eBay, hooked it up to my recent Vox 2x12" cabinet and the sound blew me away. It prompted me to dust off my vintage AC30 for a sound comparison. My vintage AC30 is an angled head 'Super Reverb Twin' with top boost and a 2x12" cabinet in a chrome trolley stand. It is 100% original and near mint. I bought it in 1981 from a small town music store. It had been returned by a customer as defective in '65 or '66, and sat in their back room (with dust covers on) for all those years. It cost me $200 and I later had it serviced for $100. It needed new tubes and had a bad solder joint that caused it to hum.

When I plugged it in this weekend, it crackled and made funny noises for a few minutes. I plugged in an Epiphone Casino and started playing at low volume, but the volume kept fluctuating. I thought that sitting around for so many years may have damaged the capacitors. I continued playing and found that after 15 minutes, everything seemed to be working perfectly. I couldn't believe the clarity of each note I played. The speakers (original Vox silverbacks) were magnificent. I can only describe the sound as 'shimmering'.

New or old, I love the sound of these amplifiers!

The overall hum level of the amp would go down if you replaced the electrolytic caps, and all those funny noises would probably go away too. Now that you've played it, it may be ok for awhile though I would probably replace the caps to be sure. If they go bad it can make the power transformer go bad which is much more expensive to fix. The coupling caps might also be leaky, especially if they are paper caps like many of the originals were. When these are bad it throws off the bias of the following stage in the amp, and can make things sound different than it should, and even as far as making the amp oscillate. Sounds like a nice amp though.