Premier Rock Forum

The hell is those dip chips?The output caps look insecure ” floating off the transformer terminal; i ve had several edcors with intermittent solder joints at the terminal. Like the insulation wasnot cleaned off very well when soldered at factory.If it makes a difference in hum you could try pre regulated dc filament voltage.

scrotescape wrote:The hell is those dip chips?The output caps look insecure ” floating off the transformer terminal; i ve had several edcors with intermittent solder joints at the terminal. Like the insulation wasnot cleaned off very well when soldered at factory.If it makes a difference in hum you could try pre regulated dc filament voltage.the dip ICs you see are probable the CD40107 that switch the relays. and there's a TL071 on the VU meter board.there's no hum issue at all.

scrotescape wrote:CD40107 for debounce/latch momentary switch?respect.well, I can t take credit for that! funny thing is that while you can google schematics of everything, I had a hard time finding a schematic for a relay circuit. so I bought a 8$ true bypass really switch kit from a online diy store, tracked the PCB, drew a schematic and tried that on the breadboard. after I got that to work, I used the relays in a couple of projects. I do like those cheap illuminated switches on my Mila a lot!

CD40107 for debounce/latch momentary switch?respect.

Looks great! Is the hum 120Hz or 60Hz?

Nate Dort wrote:120. It's volume dependent also. I took some shortcuts with grounding and tried to brute-force it. I'm going to start by separating the preamp and power amp grounds and tie them to the star ground individually. I also need to pull the grounds off the backs of the pots and return them properly to the board.Aye. Sometimes they show up in the most inexplicable of places. Fender grounded to the backs of pots for decades and it never seemed to be a problem, but on the rare occasion it is. I tend to do a modified star nowadays with a number of exceptions, and as I tend to make more and more exceptions for convenience it doesnt seem to affect anything. Yet at times i'll build the oddball amp that, for whatever reason, needs all the stops pulled to get the grounds quiet. If you really need to button it down, and havent read this before, well here you go: http://www.valvewizard.co.uk/Grounding.pdf

Here's a project I've been working on for a little while, mostly built with spare parts I had lying around. It's a modified 6G3 Deluxe in a gutted Super Champ X2 combo enclosure. Used the X2's PT and OT. The 6V6s and 12AX7 PI was already there. Just needed to add a preamp tube hole to the chassis.Fired it up for the first time last night. I didn't get to crank it, but It works. There's a hum, so I think I need to adjust the lead dress and/or the grounding scheme a bit. But hey, no smoke!

120. It's volume dependent also. I took some shortcuts with grounding and tried to brute-force it. I'm going to start by separating the preamp and power amp grounds and tie them to the star ground individually. I also need to pull the grounds off the backs of the pots and return them properly to the board.

Got the ground loop fixed. I first separated the power/filter cap ground from the preamp ground. Preamp ground returned to the chassis at the input jack, power amp to the chassis at the PT mounting bolt (star ground). That didn't fix it. In fact, it may have been worse.Then I added a separate ground wire from the output jack back to the star ground, and another one from the wiper of the heater hum-balance pot back to star ground (rather than directly to the chassis with a solder blob). That quieted everything down.Still didn't get a chance to crank it up. Kids were asleep.

Last night I was remembering this goddamn Morricone soundtrack and how awesome it is, and how shitty it is that the original masters were lost/stolen/destroyed/who knows. The bootleg CD I bought ~20 years ago was alright - whoever made it did a good job editing all the content together cohesively, but they really took a crap on the audio itself. I assume they were using some kind of primitive noise reduction plug-in or something from that era, which turned it into murky sounding, badly-encoded-to-digital lo-fi mush. Or was it a transfer from an old worn-out VHS tape, laserdisc, etc?I had a SADiE 24/96 DAW at my disposal back then, so I dumped the whole thing into it and tried to re-master/improve the sound quality. It didn't help much listening to it now, it's maybe 10% better.I found the movie on youtube that seemed to have a decent audio track, and converted the stream to a mono 320 kbps mp3. Direct A/B was pretty interesting, the ripped youtube soundtrack had more clarity/definition, even though it's mono, and who knows what fucking compression youtube is doing to the audio stream. The old CD had ~20ish pieces of music (the rest are just snippets of dialog from the movie). The youtube rip had double that if you counted all the little vignettes, etc.I'm not sure if they had another source other than the movie when the CD was originally put together, because some of the tracks seem to be clean without SFX/dialog from the movie - on a few tracks I suspect they did some heavy editing/looping to achieve this. I poked around a little to find out what really happened to the original tapes (I could've sworn I read somewhere a few years back that they were lost in a fire), and found this.https://www.amazon.com/Ennio-Morricone-Danger-Diabolik-Complete/dp/B00JAJVGBOIt's a fine effort at a 'tribute', but there's some lame sounding MIDI/samples sprinkled in, which alone is bad juju to my ears....it doesn't hold a candle to the energy of the original score. Fucking guy was on fire back then.Anyway, that's how I wasted a good chunk of my Saturday