FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Marshall Mini Stack

Question:
13 years ago I bought a Marshall Mini Stack. Used it a good bit, had it in my bedroom for 8 years then it went into the attic for 5 years - but the attic does not get crazy hot - pretty warm tho. In between it spent a month or two in the trunk of a car. Should I expect the unit to be far less than it was all those years ago? It saw most action in first 3 years of its life, BTW.

Answer:
if it DID suffer damage due to repeated exposure to hot/cold, the damage would probably take the form of PC board delamination, and frankly, if that happened, there's not much that can be done for it. IOW, you won't hurt it any more by trying it out, and you gotta find out sometime. Worst case, besides that the amp does turn out to be toast, would be that you blew a fuse in your house. Even then, the amp fuse would probably go instead. What the hell, try it out. If you want to go absolutely, whole-hog cautious (and you might as well), feed it with some other sound source than a guitar (like a cd player... the current mini-stacks have a cd input; don't know if they did 13 years ago, though) so that when you turn it on, you're not grounded to it through the guitar strings. Then plug it into a switched-off power strip, turn the volume to a low setting, switch the amp and source on, and THEN hit the power switch on the power strip. And see what you get. As PMG says, most probably it's fine. Just keep your foot on the power strip switch for a quick emergency power cut in case it starts sparking or smoking or something! If there's sound for a few minutes, and nothing smells funny, try it with a guitar.