My Yamaha THR30iiA misadventure

[lkingston]

Back in March 2021, I decided to purchase a new Yamaha THR30iiA amp. I thought it would be the perfect “acoustic living room concert” amp.

Anyway, I got it and the gain on the acoustic channel was ridiculously low. Turned up all the way, you could sort of tell that it was on, but just barely.

Rather than send it back to the dealer, I decided to take it to a service center the next day. I drove 50 miles to the nearest service center and left it there. They agreed that it was way too soft to be working, so I left it there.

They thought it must be the preamp circuit board and ordered a replacement. Yamaha sent them the wrong board (the model number was one digit off). The proper preamp was backordered months. All this took about a month and a half.

Finally, Yamaha agreed to replace it. The shop sent it in to Yamaha’s California shop. The shop in CA turned out to be an independently contracted shop.

They checked it out and, while they agreed that it was a bit soft, they thought that’s just the way this amp was. I insisted that it couldn’t be. Nobody was going to be happy with an amp that had so little gain. They got another new amp and compared it and found that it was exactly the same. With no actual repair to be made, they sent it back.

I got it back the next week, and it was the same unusable low volume that it was before I sent it off, but the app now gave me a notice saying there was a new firmware update.

On the Yamaha THR amps, you can only do firmware updates from the computer version of the app, not from the IOS or Android apps.

I plugged it in to my computer, ran the app, but saw no firmware update available. I checked on the Yamaha site though, and saw there was a new version of the computer app. I uninstalled the old app and installed the new version. When I ran that version, it showed the update. One of the updated features was a new preamp gain control in the settings.

I updated, went into the settings, changed the preamp from 0 to 9db of gain, and now the level is great! I called the shop in CA and they said that the update must have been released some time while the unit was being shipped back to me.

All of this took about three month!

Anyway, it is kind of a cool little amp now that I can actually use it. I’m not at all impressed with Yamaha’s service. Both shops were fine, but Yamaha’s support of them was lacking.

Anyway, this is probably the smallest system for amplifying guitar and vocals that actually sounds good. In the context of a living room or small coffee shop, this is really a super cool solution.

At the low volumes it can handle, it really does sound amazingly good!

In a bigger room, you can just point the amp at yourself and drive a powered speaker or two from the line outs. I’m going to use the heck out this little thing!

[YamahaGuy]

Glad you finally got it dialed in.

At first when you mentioned gain, I was thinking of the THR, because on it, the gain knob is actually the mic modeling blender when using acoustic mode.

Thanks for adding to my gas.

Enjoy!