SOLVED Duo-Phase Ticking (mainly when left side is engaged)

[jwyles90]

Hey all!

I just finished putting together this Duo-Phase, and everything is working as it should except I'm getting a fair amount LFO ticking from it. It happens the most prominently when the left side (looking at the front of the enclosure) is engaged, or when it's bypassed altogether. If I've got the right side engaged, or both at the same time, it's virtually nonexistent.

I went through and looked at all the other troubleshooting threads with this similar issue, and it seems that moving the wires around can sometimes help. I gave that a shot, and even tried using some shielded wire on the in/out jacks, and it didn't really seem to mitigate the issue all that much. I've also never used shielded wire, so there could very well be something to it that I'm unaware I need to do to make it function properly.

I suspect that I might also be getting some noise from the switched jack input wire, since it impacted the ticking a bit when I moved it around while it was plugged into my amp. I'm going to try rerouting all the wires that run the length of the enclosure to go underneath the PCB when I get home from work today, but in the meantime, I was wondering if there was anything else I could look for or try to do that maybe I'm not spotting or thinking of. Thanks in advance for all your help!!

 

[airbud]

Alright so I'm marking this one as SOLVED. I feel a little silly, but after all the buffer building, shielded wire mishaps, etc., I just completely re-did all of the wiring and the way it was laid out. I tried out @Erik S 's suggestion of having all the input and output wires be much longer than needed, and then tried moving them around in a variety of ways until I was able to get them each in a spot with the least amount of noise. Then I cut them down to the appropriate size so that they'd stay in place.
View attachment 74027
As it is now there's basically no ticking. Maybe a sliiiight bit of it if I've really got my amp turned up but otherwise it's pretty much silent. I think the biggest culprits were both the input wire on the main input (which was running right alongside the oscillator) and the switched jack input that was running underneath the other one. Thanks for all of your help those who commented! I'm glad to be able to set this one down and just play it now, rather than fuss and obsess over the wiring. I'll have a build report soon once I get a chance to record some clips of it, cause it sounds freakin awesome.

well done, this is the type of tricky little problem to track down that is the most frustrating. I think I might be having similar input noise issues with my super Heterodyne Receiver, I'm going to try shielded wire too.

 

[jwyles90]

well done, this is the type of tricky little problem to track down that is the most frustrating. I think I might be having similar input noise issues with my super Heterodyne Receiver, I'm going to try shielded wire too.

Honestly, and this is just my experience so take it with a grain of salt, but shielded wire seems like more trouble than it's worth. It's super clunky, and I didn't really find that it made all that big of a difference in terms of cutting down noise. Granted I probably didn't use it correctly, but still, something to consider.