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Introduction:
My wife has been passionately learning to play the guitar and sing for about three years now. She's even began doing "gigs" for some of the local senior care facilities. Our anniversary was approaching so I decided to look into getting her an acoustic amplifiers to help her boost her sound. After reading a ton of reviews I was really liking the Fishman Solo Amp but was having a hard time with the cost. I then came across a deal at Musicians Friend for a non functioning return for $400 - about $600 off the going street price. Being an experienced troubleshooter, I decided to take the chance and was prepared to spend several hours pouring over the amp to get it running.
When the amp showed up on my door step I immediately took it in the house and plugged it in. Maybe there was some sort of mix up and it would just work. No luck, the outputs were dead other than a "pop" when I turned the power on. The LED's didn't even turn on. I cleared off my bench, threw down a towel to prevent scratching, set the amp on top and mentally prepared myself for several hours of head pounding troubleshooting mayhem. I was surprised and hopeful when I opened it up and found an unplugged connector! Could it be if I just re-connected the cable that everything would work? I plugged it in and held my breath as I powered it up. Ahh, my clean living is finally paying off, everything appeared to work! I did however notice an annoying buzzing sound. It wasn't very loud and if you got a few feet away you couldn't hear it, particularly if there was other noise in the room. But when you were close and the room was quite it was definitely there and detracted from an otherwise awesome amp. I couldn't be sure if it was normal behavior or if there was still a problem with the amp so I hoped back on the internet and started reading more reviews. I found that several people were reporting similar problems. Since I had the amp apart anyway, I decided to take a little time and see if I could figure out what was causing the problem. I eventually found the problem and was able to clean the amp up substantially. Read on and see how I fixed it.
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Taking the amp apart:
First we need to remove the front and rear grills. There are six Allen head screws holding each one that need to be removed. Several of the plastic inserts that the screws go into slipped on my unit so I had to apply a little side pressure while removing the screws to keep the inserts from slipping. Once the screws are removed you will need to remove the four screws holding the handle in place and pull it out of box. Now pop the pop the grills off and set them aside.
Now we can remove the front and rear panels. The rear panel has six screws holding it in place. See the picture for which six to remove. The front panel has two screws holding it in place and two screws holding it from the bottom.
Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of this bit. You'll want to gently slide the rear panel out of it's hole. As you do you'll notice several connectors plugged into the circuit board. You'll want to unplug the large grey ribbon cable as well as the larger connector with the multi colored wires. You can unplug the others if you want, just make sure you note where they came from. I think they're all unique so they should only fit back into one spot, but better safe than sorry. Once the two ribbon cable are unplugged from the rear panel you should be able to completely remove the front panel. Once that's done move on to the next section.
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