SOLVED Circulator is very quiet on certain amps

applewhite

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I built the Circulator and testing it along the way on a small SS practice amp. All worked well and continued to work on the same amp after finishing and boxing the pedal. I then went to play the pedal into a Strymon Iridium and there was a very faint modulated signal when the pedal was engaged. When I turned the pedal off, the guitar signal would fizzle back up to full volume. I then tried the pedal in my full rig (traynor ygl and ampeg v4) to the same effect. Pedal tuens on but it's a very faint modulated signal. I then tested it back on the small SS practice amp and it works perfectly, same result with an Orange Micro Terror. I went through all the components thinking this was an issue of a capacitance error, but low and behold, I believe all the components are correct. Has anybody encountered this before?
I didn't use the pcb for the led and wired that up separately offboard.
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Can you describe in more detail what you mean when you say that when you turned off the pedal " the guitar signal would fizzle back up to full volume. "? Do you mean that it would not instantly switch into a clean bypass when you activated the switch? It is a clean bypass and not a buffered signal, right?
 
The fact that it works with some amps but not others makes me wonder if there's a grounding issue somewhere. What kind of power supply are you using, and could you try running it on battery power and seeing if it behaves exactly the same way? Also, I'd double check the polarity of the input and output jacks and the signal wiring to and from the board.
 
Can you describe in more detail what you mean when you say that when you turned off the pedal " the guitar signal would fizzle back up to full volume. "? Do you mean that it would not instantly switch into a clean bypass when you activated the switch? It is a clean bypass and not a buffered signal, right?
It does not instantly return to full volume. It sounds like it is powering back up to full volume when the pedal is turned off. It is a clean bypass, not buffered.
 
It does not instantly return to full volume. It sounds like it is powering back up to full volume when the pedal is turned off. It is a clean bypass, not buffered.

That sounds an awful lot like a dodgy power connection. That's happened to a couple of my builds where the DC jack isn't quite secure, but it only happens on the tayda 2 prong ones, not on the boss style.
 
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