Really obvious effects question.

Deijavoo

Delays and fuzz particularly, but all effects are much more prominent in a quiet amp for me, almost off putting. I do use all my chain in front and when in a deafening band context it's class, but in an amp set quietly at home, or Amplitube it's really annoying.

What is the reason for this? 

Cheers. 

ThePrettyDamned

I've often wondered why I can have the volume of my pedals set so low at home, yet need to crank them up to make them audible at volume.

Glad iI'm not the only one to wonder.

JDE

It's compression. When your amp is loud, it's basically levelling the peaks and amplifying the troughs of your signal. It's the reason why a loud amp, played clean, before it's point of naturally compressing, makes you sound really loud and clangy with lots of uneven volume spikes, but once you add overdrive or distortion, you actually sound quieter. "Disappearing fuzz" or "disappearing distortion" is a common theme of woe on guitar forums.
As for the pedals needing to have more output at higher volume, I've never heard an adequate answer, but the one which makes the most sense is that your guitar's output isn't increasing like your amp's output, so you need to give your signal a bit of a shunt.

JDE

Double post

Deijavoo

I just know @ICBM will enlighten me further still. Cheers dudes. 

ChrisMusic

So you've got power amp compression, your ears will start to compress the signal, which is why compressed stuff can sound louder, simple psychology, but seriously overdone in mastering and final mixes nowadays.  Then you have the cohesive influence of the room acoustics knitting things together better too.

I too am interested to see some more opinions on this, there is always so much more to these phenomena than meets the eye.

Cacofonix

I'm guessing it's due to the disparity between preamp and poweramp relative levels.  The poweramp distortion will add a layer of harmonics to the signal which will muffle the harmonics of the pedals and the preamp.  Effectively you get a new element of tone added when the poweramp volume goes up and you need to compensate for that.

If you set the pedals up for drive with the master volume and controlled the amp's volume with the preamp volume, you'll probably not need to mess with the pedals so much.

It'd be loud though.

ThePrettyDamned

But this happens on my bandit - a totally clean solid state pre and power amp.

I suspect it's possibly something to do with our ears, as @chrismusic alluded to. But I've no idea, it is bizarre.

JDE

It happens in SS amps too, though. If you ignore pedals and put your guitar volume on, say, 4, then crank the amp, the increase in volume is much "slower" over the course the amp volume knob than it would be if your guitar was on 10. Amps, preamp, power amp, even modellers, like signal - the more the better. Voodoo hifi shit - ICBM is deffo your man. Just having a quiet amp means that the signal from a lot of pedals makes for high volume as the amp has too much headroom "left" before it starts to say "hold that shit" and level it out. The "hold that shit" level is generally why tube amp people like tube amps. The "I'm never going to get to hold that shit before it sounds shit" people like SS amps. The "I've shit the bed, let's shit some more" = Neil Young.

ICBM

Not really, I'm just as unscientific as the rest of us with stuff like this really .

I think what's happening is mainly what happens to relative levels against a mix. When a guitar sound is in isolation you hear all the nuances of it, including effects which are quieter than the dry signal. But run that through a loud amp in a band mix where the dry signal balances with the rest of the band, and the effects tend to get lost because they're quieter than the average level.

Distortion also sounds much louder in isolation relative to a clean sound than it really is because your ear picks up on the harshness of it, so to get an apparent match the distorted sound has to be *quieter* than the clean. But if you put that into a band mix the distortion disappears, because it's now quieter than the band if the clean sound was about the same level - so you need to turn up the distortion so it *actually* matches the clean level.