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This is the cap. I hope Ralph is wrong. 3 sets of E88cc were whistling. When the cap was replaced, the whistle for the most part stopped. One set let a little squeel out for 5 seconds then stopped. These tubes are dead quiet in my preamp. All were tested.
One ground connection on the input was never soldered. That is why I suspect after market silver wiring was installed that I "feel" I was lead to believe was factory silver path wiring. It was not part of the original amp. I believe if I dig through a thread I can find mention these were the $12k amps. They are not. They are level 5 base product. The serial number told the story. "I believe" the reference to the value is based upon after market alterations.
Look. I did not specifically ask. Its bad on me. If I had asked I would have offered less or walked away. I made the mistake of wanting to believe and did not specifically drill down, ask, and circle back with reference to forum chain conversations. That is a personal fault of mine. I run on faith. If I were to turn these around, I would have said they are modified base level amps with after market alterations. (I was told they were modified) They have ground issues and are hyper sensitive to tube selection. $2500. I paid $4500. I think that is too much for 19 year old amps that cost $7500 new. I have seen other Black Shadow 2, around 5 years old or so for $5,000.
Per my glimmer of hope, I hear what they are capable of. The base product is a solid foundation. The rub for me is bringing it up to snuff will be a total in of around $8,000. A brand new BS2 level 5 base product is $7,500.
Lastly, whatever was done to the amps left them with a nasty ground fault. This amp is not suppose to require a cheater to calm an enormous ground issue. The seller did send me a set of Ebtech HumX. That was solid of him. In my opinion it should not be necessary. The circuit should work right. Not be cobbled together and ground lift required. This was a big driver for my sending them in to have the circuit brought back to spec. Sure sure sure, all sorts of tube guys use cheaters. In my system I know I don't have ground loops. These amps actually roared when a shorting plug was in the input and the amp only had a power cord and speaker cable connected. When you turned both on they were loud as heck out the speakers. Darnedest thing. Lifting the ground killed much of it. Weird.....
Here are the facts, as I was the seller. Today, Audion Black Shadow base Level 5 cost $13,499 in the US. Base level 5 has silver wire in the audio path and copper wound transformers. Level 6 gets you silver secondaries in the OPTs. Further levels up get you more silver until at the top of the heap you can get all-silver OPT and PT. At the time I bought these amps, Black Shadow was only available as Level 5. The other levels were reserved for the Golden Dream 300B PSET monoblocks.
The amps were bought new by me
direct from Audion UK, when their US price was $11,995/pair. Audion was between importers at the time. No one other than Bob Hovland had been inside those amps from the time I bought them in 2005 through selling to Kingrex (at his request) in 2020. Prior to then, only Audion UK had access to them. In that time, the power supply was upgraded, with the high voltage supply recapped with better-sounding Nichicon electrolytics. Hovland wrung -10db of noise out of the amps by rerouting some wiring, improving ground and building custom shields for the power transformers. These mods found their way into newer versions of Audion's amps, and even today, since Audion builds to order, they offer the Nichicon caps option. Additionally, the just-adequate rectifiers for the 845 filament supply were upgraded so they did not have to be replaced every 2 or 3 years. Aside from the rectifier failure that prompted that upgrade, I had no non-elective maintenance issues with those amps in the 15 years I owned them. Before they left Los Angeles, the amps were working perfectly, exhibiting none of the problems cited here by the buyer.
What I do have is the full record of email and text messages communications detailing the buyer's immediate plunge into the innards of the amps, and his frequent expressions of sonic satisfaction once I coached him through eliminating hum in the context of his system. I never represented those amps as anything other than what was delivered: 1st generation Black Shadows, Level 5, modified by Bob Hovland for specific objectives (met and which Audion itself later adopted) making them roughly equivalent to BS Mk II but not the Mk II Mk II. The biggest difference being that the amps I bought were from the era when Audion sourced their transformers from S&B in the UK, and since then they are winding their own at their facility in France, which I also pointed out to the buyer. I do believe Audion has improved their mechanical and electrical build quality over the past 6 or 8 years specifically. I supplied 845A, 845B, 845C and Psvane 845-T tubes so the buyer could find a preferred voicing, and delivered NOS premium input and driver tubes that worked perfectly and quietly when the amps left L.A. BTW, the Audion stock 845 is the Chinese 845A.
I'll also add that Gary at True Audiophile heard those same Black Shadows
in my house several times before he moved from Santa Monica to Oregon, and each time remarked how they sounded better than any Black Shadows he had heard before then.
I can't comment on the allegation that an input ground connection was never soldered. If so, it escaped my visual inspection and Hovland's but also if so, it never behaved like an unsoldered connection. That is, no related noise issue ever materialized. As for the blown cap, having shipped a pair of Audion Golden Dreams that apparently had some hard knocks courtesy of FedEx Ground, where a couple of cap leads were severed or cracked (with no outward sign of damage to cartons nor chassis) it is possible that something similar occurred on the ride north to Seattle. Otherwise, outside of Bob's power supply upgrades and noise reduction, everything in those amps is as supplied by Audion. No other techs had been in them during their residence with me, and that includes me. I never ventured into those amps with a soldering iron. Bob's work is beyond reproach. During all of their time with me, they were also fed a steady, actively-regulated diet of 119.9 - 120vAC.
The net is that the normally vulnerable parts of an aging amp were relatively new. They were used in a home with two high end tube systems so hadn't even carried anywhere close to the full listening load. The amps left Los Angeles quieter than the spec on new Black Shadow and all other tests yielded robust results. 845 tubes supplied were either new or low hours tested as-new. Input and driver tubes were an assortment of NOS or low-hours tested-as-new Euro and Russian, chosen to give the buyer some choices and latitude in voicing. I do not think Audion amps are hypersensitive to tube selection but they are highly resolving so differences in tube sonics are obvious. I never found them sensitive to tube differences in dysfunctional ways, however.
Always happy to give the buyer any history, context or guidance. The baseline facts are as I outline here, and I cannot account for deltas post-shipping. I have been in used audio exchanges of various types now going back 50 years, with over 20 years via online venues.
Phil
