Mesa Boogie Recto Recording Preamp problems.....

[Spike j]

Hi all, this is my first post and wonder if any one can help.....

I've got a Mesa Boogie Recto Preamp, got it off eBay for a good price, so I thought..... There was lots of noise, horrible clipping ( not the overdrive sound ) I took it to be repaired at the eBay sellers expense, its better but not what I expect. I've been on forums and read a fair few threads on these thing and I get the impression that maybe its how I've got the amp set, so after tweaking I found I can get a good sound with out the nasty clipping sound. What I want to know, is this normal practice with this amp? What I find on the clean chan is that I set the gain to how I want it then tweak the master I can't go past 12:00 before the clipping sound starts, if I turn the master full then the thing sounds horrible, it's just noise. On the red chan if the master is to low the I get a nasty noise, turn it up and it goes right down then start going up higher and it's just noise. Is this how it's surposed to be and is this what I keep hearing that this preamp takes a lot of setting up?

I'm running from the record out in to my Behringer Eurorack MX2642 mixer, ive got my Marshall JMP1 preamp going into this mixer also with no problems at all

Can any shed any light on this please?

Thanks in advance

 

[blackba]

Do you know what they did when they repaired it? (ie replaced tubes, changed out caps, etc???)

If you can I would try it into a power amp, then into a guitar cab. See if it does the same thing. At least I would try the various outputs of the preamp, so see if its just in the recording out.

 

[some dude]

On a Recto the channel master controls how hot the signal is leaving the preamp and entering the effects loop. If you have the gain set high (ie, you're on the red channel) you have to drop the channel master or you'll start overdriving the effects loop.

If you're using the emulated output I assume you'll run into the same issues with the signal being too hot at high channel master settings and driving the piss out of the emulator circuit.

On my Rectos I run the modern channel's master at 10:00, then adjust the other channel(s) to balance it.

Check out page 16 for some ideas.

http://www.mesaboogie.com/manuals/Recti ... PreAmp.pdf

 

[Spike j]

Thanks for the reply's I've tried going through the live out and it's better but still not how I expect it to be. I have not run into any effects as i wanted to hear just the preamp, I was also thinking I was putting more signal into my mixer than it could cope with and thought that was the problem but unfortunately it's still pointing to the preamp still being faulty.

Trying to get my money back now through eBay and PayPal now.......

Thanks