A knowledgeable tech who cares about this stuff needs to track it down at the source. If the hiss is coming from one of the above components, the cathode follower mod will not eliminate it.

Wanted to say that i recently bought a cream board bjr and it had the usual hum issues and fuzzy bottom end issues right out of the box. I haven’t performed any changes to the componentry yet, however – twisted and redressed the cables from the power tranny, wrapped the exterior in copper shielding tape (probably didn’t do anything, but i had plenty laying around and figured it probably wouldn’t hurt), built a bent piece of metal (an old bottom of a hammond box) applied b/w the op tranny and power tranny, bent the power tube ribbons away from the plate lead and also had to slice up the ribbon to the phase inverter to get rid of nasty oscillations that weren’t too noticeable at low volume, but terrible when cranked. The amp is now completely silent…no hum whatsoever, no ringing when cranked, and as a completely unexpected bonus – the bottom end cleared up significantly after splitting up the ribbon to the phase inverter.

For anyone planning to use this little amp in a studio scenario – i highly recommend these “physical” modifications, and as always, use a solid separate cab to minimize the chance of rattles getting into the mic. Thanks for the ideas.