thunderaxe
New member
hi all,
i'm just about finished building my pandora's box with a couple of mods -- i added the CB bass mod, and borrowed the "drive knob" mod from the aion dynamo, which replaces the two switches with a B1K pot and 240R fixed resistor, for a variable resistance of 240R to 1.24K, a greater range than the switches offered (outside of forbidden mode).
anyway i've spent the last couple of days certain i must've screwed something up because even with drive and gain knobs maxed, the gain is about the same as my RAT with distortion at noon. surely, i thought, a circuit that has two RAT gain stages cascaded into each other, that has a 1M gain pot where the RAT has a 100K, that is famous for its absolutely unhinged psycho fuzz when totally unleashed, would have at least as much gain on tap as a RAT, even when not in forbidden mode. that is, until i googled "expandora gain RAT" and found indeed, a lot of people saying that the expandora doesn't have the same kind of gain as a RAT and outside of forbidden mode pretty much only does low- to mid-gain. which is pretty disappointing to me, considering that even though i love the versatility of the RAT, my preferred settings usually start at noon, and tend toward the big-muff-but-with-more-mids-and-more-clarity end of things.
so i'd like to see if i can get more gain out of it. surely there is a lot of rich territory to be explored between maximum distortion-mode and unhinged psycho fuzz forbidden mode. i suspect that the first gain stage isn't the place to look, since the 1M gain pot would seem to suggest that it already has 10x the gain on tap that a regular RAT does, and instead i should be looking at the second section where the switches/drive pot are. i've sussed out the basic idea of how to control it -- the more resistance in the negative feedback loop, the more gain, and forbidden mode is an open switch, meaning essentially infinite resistance and thus maximum gain from the op amp. so should i maybe just start increasing the value of the drive pot? it's 1K so there's plenty of room to grow from there. any idea what level of resistance would be functionally equivalent to an open switch and thus forbidden mode?
mostly i'm asking if anyone has any other, potentially better, ideas than just increasing the value of the drive pot, whether that might cause unforeseen problems, and what might be some good values to try out.
thanks!!
i'm just about finished building my pandora's box with a couple of mods -- i added the CB bass mod, and borrowed the "drive knob" mod from the aion dynamo, which replaces the two switches with a B1K pot and 240R fixed resistor, for a variable resistance of 240R to 1.24K, a greater range than the switches offered (outside of forbidden mode).
anyway i've spent the last couple of days certain i must've screwed something up because even with drive and gain knobs maxed, the gain is about the same as my RAT with distortion at noon. surely, i thought, a circuit that has two RAT gain stages cascaded into each other, that has a 1M gain pot where the RAT has a 100K, that is famous for its absolutely unhinged psycho fuzz when totally unleashed, would have at least as much gain on tap as a RAT, even when not in forbidden mode. that is, until i googled "expandora gain RAT" and found indeed, a lot of people saying that the expandora doesn't have the same kind of gain as a RAT and outside of forbidden mode pretty much only does low- to mid-gain. which is pretty disappointing to me, considering that even though i love the versatility of the RAT, my preferred settings usually start at noon, and tend toward the big-muff-but-with-more-mids-and-more-clarity end of things.
so i'd like to see if i can get more gain out of it. surely there is a lot of rich territory to be explored between maximum distortion-mode and unhinged psycho fuzz forbidden mode. i suspect that the first gain stage isn't the place to look, since the 1M gain pot would seem to suggest that it already has 10x the gain on tap that a regular RAT does, and instead i should be looking at the second section where the switches/drive pot are. i've sussed out the basic idea of how to control it -- the more resistance in the negative feedback loop, the more gain, and forbidden mode is an open switch, meaning essentially infinite resistance and thus maximum gain from the op amp. so should i maybe just start increasing the value of the drive pot? it's 1K so there's plenty of room to grow from there. any idea what level of resistance would be functionally equivalent to an open switch and thus forbidden mode?
mostly i'm asking if anyone has any other, potentially better, ideas than just increasing the value of the drive pot, whether that might cause unforeseen problems, and what might be some good values to try out.
thanks!!
