Thread: Mike and Scott
View Single Post
  #2   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.pro
Mike Rivers[_2_] Mike Rivers[_2_] is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,190
Default Mike and Scott

On 10/27/2019 10:33 AM, gray_wolf wrote:
If you were designing a solid state guitar preamp for guitar, pedal
steel and fiddle for the cleanest possible sound what would be the
maximum signal input you would design for. I built some amps Using
j-fets.My first stage would handle 1.0 Vrms, with a gain of 10.


A hot pickup can put out about twice that voltage when played hard, but
remember that these things vary a lot, and players play with a lot of
dynamic range. I think what you have on the front end is pretty
reasonable for most instruments, though.

This worked well but I, later on, upped the power amp to 240 watts and
felt I could use a bit more front end gain and eliminate the master gain
control for low noise studio work.


Geez, how loud do you want it?!! If you aren't driving the amplifier as
hard as you want to, you should put another stage of gain between your
preamp and the power amplifier. Try to push the preamp gain by another 6
dB and you'll probably be running into clipping at the output.

The idea of a master gain is that you can overdrive the preamp stages to
get as much distortion as you want, and then bring the volume down to a
tolerable level. I don't think that you have either of those problems.
But if you want to be able to get the distorted front end sound, then
you might indeed want to pad down the input of the power amplifier
rather than boost it up to full level with another gain stage.


--
For a good time, call http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com