Potential Attenuator problems

bacchanalian

I am currently running my Victoria Regal II into a Dr Z Brake Lite (purchased from miserneil) and am soon to increase the attenuation with a TAD Silencer  (purchased from Cloud Nine).
In the Victoria manual they do not recommend using an attenuator.
Does anyone have any ideas what damage using an attenuator could cause? I will be running the amp at about 65% of maximum.
 

ICBM

They're probably just covering themselves. There are some old attenuators which were a bit notorious for damaging amps, so that may be why.

Any properly-designed amp is safe with a properly-designed attenuator, if it's safe with a speaker - simply because a properly-designed attenuator looks very much like a speaker, to the amp.

But I'm not sure I'd be happy with using a Brake Lite with a 35W amp. I know it's supposedly rated at 45W, but from seeing inside them I wouldn't really like to push it that hard. 45W of *electrical power* is probably closer to it - which means a fully-overdriven 25W amp could be about as much as really handles. Whether the 65% of maximum actually correlates to that much power, I don't know.

This all sounds a bit geeky but it does matter, because if you burn out the attenuator the amp then has no load.

I'm not familiar with the TAD but I see it's rated for 150W, so that should be safe.

bacchanalian

@ICBM Many thanks, that is reassuring.  I am only running the amp with 1 or 2 6V6 and a 5Y3 so maybe 12 or 15 watts.
Sometimes I run a single EL34.  I also do not drive the amp too hard, ideally to just where it starts to break up when you dig in.
My main issue is trying to keep the volume down.  I am thinking of investigating a Blues Cube. 
 
  

ICBM

That sounds like you'll be fine with the Brake Lite. It's definitely OK with even a fully overdriven 15W amp.

If you can't get the volume low enough with it or the TAD (which does have a 'bedroom level' setting from reading the spec) then you can actually run both together, in either order - that might allow you to finely tune it a bit more without losing tone.