Interactive tone controls

Dave_Mc · December 2013

This is not really related to the thread, but I'll post it anyway since it's related to the book- it's a pretty good primer if you don't know anything about it, but it's very much an amp book written for guitarists rather than an amp book for electronics types. I'm far more a guitarist than electronics type, and even for me, I found some of the bits in the intro to be a bit over-simplified. The other thing I'd say is, while I do like his books and think they're pretty good, he doesn't seem capable of differentiating his opinions from facts. I got sick of the bits later in the book (or maybe it's in one of his other books, I have a bunch) where he basically said a Soldano SLO didn't sound as good as a cranked up Plexi because it has a master volume or some such guff.

ecc83 · December 2013

ICBM said:

ecc83 said:
Never heard of "phase smear" and I am not going to get into THAT discussion! Caps cause phase shift. Period.
I will have to apologise for slipping into audiophool terminology .

Caps definitely cause phase shift. The 'problem' (from a hi-fi point of view) with the standard passive tone stack is that it's not consistent across the frequency range - I think it may make a genuinely audible difference too, since I pretty much always prefer amps with that sort of stack over ones without.

Apology accepted heh!

The "problem" with passive tone stacks for "quality" amplification is that they are always a compromise between noise and headroom, a properly designed feedback tone circuit solves both issues.

Guitar amps are noisy buggers at the best of times so we are not concerned with a few dBs better noise figure, neither does a few extra % distortion matter indeed, probably what "makes" the circuit so useful!

Dave.

Phil_aka_Pip · December 2013

This isn't the first of Dave Hunter's books that I've read. You could summarise any of his books in these terms:

"There are no rules. Go listen, draw your own conclusions."

It irks me that he talks in more than one place in this book about volts "going through" something. They don't. The go across things and push amps though them (in inverse proportion to resistance)

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Interactive tone controls

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