Scientific measurements of clipping diode differences

Fama said:
Thanks, I'll give that a thorough read.

I was wondering if it was better to try and do the "balancing" with a trimmer/pot along with the clipping diodes, since that should help remove the difference caused by a stronger signal hitting the op-amp/buffer/whatever part of the circuit. But then I'm not sure if the trimmer/pot itself could be claimed to color the tone enough to make a difference.
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Use the diode clipping setup from the Klon circuit. It's designed to be "leakage independent." People have always made a big deal about the "true" Klon diodes, when in reality it was specifically designed so it will work with any Ge diode you put in there.

What you need is to drive it with an opamp buffer, 1uf or greater capacitor and 1K resistor - just like the Klon. The cap need to be big because the diode leakage can also change the corner frequency of the high pass filter.
 
In an electronics repair shop I worked in we had a Huntron Tracker. Similar to an o'scope but different-it applied an analog sine wave to the device under test. When a single component was tested a specific waveform would be displayed.

With the probes not connected to anything a horizontal line was displayed.

Shorting the it was a vertical line.

A resistor had a slanted line, angle depended on resistor value.

A capacitor would be circular or oval.

A diode would show a "L" shape, you could see the knee. You could also see the capacitance as two diverging and recombining lines at the knee. The knee has a different shape depending on if it has a rising or falling voltage.

I believe this would be one way to electrically distinguish the various diode types. Unfortunately at the moment I'm too poor to make the investment to investigate it myself. Maybe one day...
 
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