Tube has a "glassy" rattle

[JosephDuffy]

Hi everyone,

I've had my S.E.X. 2.1 kit for a few months now but recently (last week or so) noticed a "glassy" rattle in the left channel (kind of like the noise you make when you run your finger around a wine glass). I figured this was something that I'd messed up during soldering and thought I'd get round to checking it out soon. The put my mind at rest I turned the amp off, let the tubes cool down and swapper them over.

After swapping over the tubes the rattle was in the right channel, which leads me believe that the source of the rattle is the tube.

Are there any further things I can do to diagnose the issue/any recommended paths for replacement (should that be required)?

Thanks,
Joseph Duffy

[JosephDuffy]

Hate to be "that" guy, but, "bump?"

[Paul Birkeland]

This is something you hear through your headphones, or the tube itself is a little rattly?

[JosephDuffy]

This is something you hear through your headphones, or the tube itself is a little rattly?

Something I hear through the headphones. There's the usual little rattles on warmup but this specific rattle seems to come about at certain frequencies and only in the right channel (was left until I swapped the tubes round)

[Paul Joppa]

If the voltages are right, then it is safe to continue using the tube - nothing "fixable" has gone wrong.

That said, there are a lot of ways a tube can make a sporadic noise voltage, and a lot of kinds of such noise. Since this moves with the tube, you can get rid of it by replacing the tube - they are pretty cheap.

If you have an intellectual curiosity about what exactly causes this, you can probably get years of enjoyment hunting it down, and learn a ton of interesting tube trivia in the process. To get others usefully involved, you'd probably want to get a recording of the noise - descriptions are nearly impossible to make sense of, in spite of years spent by the audiophile press ...  :^)  Next step would be to see if you can identify something that triggers it - mechanical jostling, electrical environment (fridge coming on for example), certain musical events, anything or even nothing.