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Re: (RL) The production
At 3:29 PM +0000 7/12/01, Per RosÈn wrote:
It would be great to know about for ex the 8" cabinet. To be able to
play a little quieter. I need to crank the amp (master volume) to
get the overdrive sound, I hate so called preamp-distortion.
Only my own experiences. It would be interesting to know about
yours, and Richards'.
I can answer for myself that I finally "found" my guitar sound with a
Kalamazoo Model Two amp (tube, ~8 watts, 10" speaker, tremelo). When
cranked, it sounded great with my single-coil guitar for rhythm;
sounded a bit blatty on chords from the humbucker, but great on leads.
Since it's a pretty tiny amp (1 6bq5 power tube), it was easy enough
for me to put in an attenuator--I didn't have to worry about
dissipating a lot of heat.
I put in an 8 ohm, 10 watt rheostat after the output transformer so I
could turn the amp all the way up and turn the speaker output down.
It's important how you wire it--you need to present a constant load
to the output transformer, or else very bad things happen (arcing
inside the transformer and tubes, for example). I picked up the
basic schematic from an old (1954) audio handbook. If you're
interested, I can scan the diagram, or whip it up in ASCII.
(Disclaimer: I'm not responsible for damage done to amps on the basis
of ASCII art.)
There are some arguments that since a speaker presents a variable
load at different frequencies, you need an attenuator to do the same,
and a passive resistor (like my rheostat) doesn't do that.
Supposedly, this changes the tone of the amp at low volumes. It may
be so, and I'd definitely not want to do this to a louder amp (way
too much heat to get rid of), but I found that I quite liked the tone
of my Kalamazoo with this arrangement. Your mileage may vary, of
course.
HTH,
Maurice
--
Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/
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