I have three very old high powered tube amplifiers that were originally designed to be top of the line amplifiers for theaters. They are all identical, and were rack mounted, but I build cases fro them. Back in my younger days, in the late 1960's, I used three of these amps for my stereo. Left channel, right channel, and delayed center channel using a spring reverb. I built some huge speaker towers, and ended up with a stereo capable of blowing the windows out of a house, which I proved back in my wilder days. Either way, this system had better sound than any commercial stereo.
Anyhow, I have had these speakers and the amps in storage since the late 70's. I decided it was time to bring this system back to life and brought it all home. Other than some dust and mildew, and a mouse nest in the cabinet of one of the amps, (which I removed), everything appears to be ok.
I want to power up these amps, one at a time. However, I'm a little concerned about the filter capacitors. I did replace all of them in the early 70's. They were still available back then, and they were very unusual caps because they had an Octal plug in base. I'm almost sure these can no longer be bought.
Fianlly, I want to power them up without a chance of a bad filter cap doing any damage. Is there any way to power them up without applying full voltage at first? Or should I just add a few fuses ahead of the filter caps? I should note that these amps have a main power line fuse and each of the four output tubes also has a fuse and a neon light to determine output tube faults.
I know someone will ask what brand they are. I do not know..... There are no numbers of brand names on them. However, they have about
40 lbs of transformers on each amp, and that is why they always had an awesome sound spectrum.