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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 1, 2009 23:51:56 GMT -5
A friend of mine has an active pickup system in his bass. Apparently, it includes boost/cut controls for both Bass and Treble. He said that when he turns the Bass control in the direction of Boost, he gets what he calls a "nasty growling" that he wanted to get rid of. I took this to mean distortion, and he agreed.
In further discussion he told me that it doesn't seem to matter where he sets the controls on his amp, nor where he sets the master volume on the bass. This leads me to believe that the distortion is happening inside the bass.
So my idea for a solution (never having actually seen the circuit, really a "best guess") is to provide the active circuitry more "rail voltage". I'm thinking somewhere between say 12-18V. This should increase its headroom.
This leads to two main questions:
1) Which components in the circuit are most likely to be damaged by this higher voltage? Yes, we know nothing about this circuit. Where (in general) might we start to look for weak points? I figure it's a good idea to google up the data sheets for any ICs or transistors we find, but what about the passive components? Especially those which might not be labeled with a maximum voltage or power rating? Can anybody say with reasonable certainty that "it's likely to be okay up to X volts"?
1a) Will we get any sort of warning before something like a capacitor fails from over voltage?
2) The most convenient way to accomplish this would be to wire 2 x 9V batteries in series and then divide the resulting 18V back down to whatever we decide we need. I was thinking of wiring in a pot, and he got to thinking about possibly using it to lower the rail voltage, which would operate something like a distortion control. I haven't discussed with him the relative merits of opamp clipping distortion... What's a good (safe) value for this pot?
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