Any ideas why no signal passes through pedal? I've built this circuit before with no problems!

[UtilityBeltFX]

Okay so, this is an Aion FX Polaris (Human Gear Animato) that I modified using the Buff N Blend circuit in place of the normal bypass board. The pedal turns on and passes signal when I have the BnB turned all the way to the clean blend. But when I turn it up to the distortion circuit side of things, there is no signal. Only white noise as if I'm hearing the actual distortion being generated but no signal passing through it. The controls for VOL/DIST/TONE affect the noise that's exiting the pedal.

The reason I'm so stumped is because I've built this exact circuit with the Buff N Blend before and it worked perfectly the first time! My only possible hunch is that the first time I used Aion's supplied Mouser BOM to order everything, and this time I sourced everything myself, mainly through Tayda. The 2N5088's I got from Small Bear, and the germanium NTE102/103'a I got from NTEPartsDirect. So I don't feel like I bought any counterfit parts... It just feels like I screwed something up but can't figure out what. I took my digital multi-meter to the circuit last night and traced the whole thing. Power was making it's way all the way to the end! I sort of thought that should mean everything should be okay, but I'm still sort of a beginner at all this.

I just wanted to see if the brains here had any thoughts before I start ripping this thing apart and starting over.

Thank you all.

Ross

 

[Cybercow]

Socketed transistors (and other devices) can often not seat correctly and/or make insufficient contact. I like to "wrinkle" the legs a bit before inserting them into sockets. It tends to better assure 'contact'.

 

[Nic]

Sorry to bring back this old thread, I've ordered the polaris and was hoping to make it work with the buff n blend.

 

[UtilityBeltFX]

They definitely work together. At least they did the first time I built this. But I couldn't get this one to sound right so I'm rebuilding it soon.

 

[zgrav]

How much troubleshooting did you do besides test power with the multimeter? An audio probe is probably the easiest tool to use to trace how the audio signal is going through the circuit. After making sure the audio goes into the PCB, you can then see if it is present at the PCB output. and then work forwards or backwards (or both) using the schematic to find the parts of the board to keep checking along the signal path.

 

[zgrav]

also -- did you test your build outside of the enclosure to see if it worked? when you note above that you can hear differences in the output when you turn the pots, it suggests that your audio signal is just not reaching those parts of the circuit.

 

[UtilityBeltFX]

I didn't update everyone because no one seemed particularly interested, but I did end up building an audio probe and tracing the whole path. The pedal works now, but not properly like the first one I built. It's immensely bright, and not very distorted.

 

[Nic]

I'm back here... I've made my polaris board work, had problems with sockets, but I am sure it worked and it sounded great !

So I then soldered the nte102/3 directly to the board and soldered the 5088 to their sockets. Then I build a buff n blend type circuit and inserted it between the switch board and main board. The blend worked but ended up with the same issue as yours. My connections were temporary so I removed the bnb and my issue is clearly on the main board.

I'll need to audio probe, but did you remember what your problem was ?

Thanks !

 

[DeadAirMD]

I just built Aion's Cirrus board and those half dome dual pot holes jumped out at me when I first looked at the board. At first I thought half of another print broke off on the top of my Cirrus board haha.

 

[Nic]

Hum... I'll look into that