DOH!!

Those of us that are pretty serious about our LPs have a cleaning ritual before each playing. I use a combination of different cleaning solutions. Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but it keeps the records in fine sounding shape. I have a pipette for the record preservative, when I withdrew it from the bottle, it immediately shot out a quantity of the liquid in the vicinity of my amp for the left channel. I didn’t see anything, or smell anything burning so I quickly dismissed it as a close call. Grrr, I put on “Life’s Rich Pageant” and thought, “Crap, I’ve worn this LP down to nothing…” It was scratchy, distorted, etc. So I immediately got onto ebay and put in a bid on another copy. Then the phone rang. It’s easy to forget how handy a pause control is on cd players when you’re halfway through an album side… I lifted the needle and got Rick. When I put the needle back down my heart stopped. The left channel sputtered and then went dead. OMG! I’ve fried my amp! Hmm, all the tubes are still lit though, and there’s no smell… Wait a minute, the right side is quickly fading too…. I had forgotten about my phono preamp. It is powered off of two 9 volt batteries. I popped in two new ones and viola! It sounded just like it should. Guess I didn’t need that new copy after all…

Isaac