Help! Amp issue

Chad

Chad

Slender Hobbit
My Electro-Harmonix Mig is awesome. The only 'problem' is the volume knob sucks. It is bedroom level up to 1, then past 1 it is full volume. There is no taper to the volume. Any ideas on how to tame that? I'd love to have a more gradual volume increase.
 
Replace the volume pot with an audio taper...but also consider an attenuator...the cheaper ones are a bit of a tone sucker (like my Jet City Jettenuator) but they're effective...
 
some amps are like that; my solution was always an attenuator; not to try to get bedroom volume out of a cranked amp, but just to have a litttttle more fine control over that master volume
 
Attenuators are the best choice. Master volumes are touchy in general whether linear or audio taper.

If your amp has both preamp volume and master, sometimes turning the master up and using the preamp volume to control the over all volume works great. Truly depends if you use preamp distortion or pedal generated distortion.

If preamp, attenuator, if pedal use the preamp volume as your master.
 
Chad said:
... then past 1 it is full volume. There is no taper to the volume
Click to expand...

No taper at all? Meaning it's full-bore, tube overdrive like the "knob is dimed" despite position? Or just that there is no taper between quiet and LOUD, but then tapers from that point. The latter is pretty common, ween with audio taper pots.

The original Sovtek Mig 50 schematic designates a 1M audio pot for the Volumes. The only way to know what's in the EH is to test it with a DMM, which may not be easy as the EH model uses more PCB-mounted parts.

This may just be a case where the "below 1" volume is because the circuit is choked off below a saturation point, once enough voltage hits an input grid somewhere...BAM!

Just have to add, schematics was courtesy of Steve Aloha's site. Steve passed two months ago but he was an incredible resource to the DIY community.
 
Wyatt said:
No taper at all? Meaning it's full-bore, tube overdrive like the "knob is dimed" despite position? Or just that there is no taper between quiet and LOUD, but then tapers from that point. The latter is pretty common, ween with audio taper pots.

The original Sovtek Mig 50 schematic designates a 1M audio pot for the Volumes. The only way to know what's in the EH is to test it with a DMM, which may not be easy as the EH model uses more PCB-mounted parts.

This may just be a case where the "below 1" volume is because the circuit is choked off below a saturation point, once enough voltage hits an input grid somewhere...BAM!

Just have to add, schematics was courtesy of Steve Aloha's site. Steve passed two months ago but he was an incredible resource to the DIY community.
Click to expand...

Its more the no taper between quiet and LOUD. I think there is taper after that, but it is so freaking loud at that point, I'm not going any higher :grin:
 
Does it have an effects loop? An easy solution is to put a volume pot in the loop. Or an EQ Pedal.


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I ended up getting a volume pedal to put in front. Well more like a volume knob.

nose.PNG
It works great. I put it on top of my amp and now I can turn up the amp and keep the volume tame. I've been using that for a few weeks, but today I remembered I had a few other preamp tubes and wanted to see how they sounded. So I threw a 12AT7 and 12AU7 in V2 and V1. It dropped the volume considerably. Before I made the tube swap, I was running the Nose pedal at about 9 o'clock. After the swap, I had to run the Nose at 2 o'clock to keep the volume up. I may end up swapping all 3 and see what happens.
 
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