My parentheses Vs. my Lifepedal

k3150

New member
Please note that this is more of a curiosity, not an obsession and my parenthesis sounds great but different and I just wanted to see if I could figure out what that difference was.

So I built my parentheses a while back and it seems to work fine, but I got curious and I hooked them both up to an A/B loop and checked them. Their were two differences that I noticed. One was that the distortion tone was definitely off by a little bit, and the other is that potentiometer on the Octave is way off but maybe in a cool way. I am not sure yet. Once I noticed these issues, I ended taking the pedals to my computer and running a sine wave from my MicroFreak through the pedals and looking at the waveforms with the Melda Oscilloscope plugin.

They both produce almost an identical waveform off the sine wave, but the lifepedal clearly has a shorter pulsewidth. I think it is something like 20% shorter then the parentheses. This makes them sound just a little bit different. This difference is present in all three clipping modes for both pedals. Any ideas on how one could make the pulsewidth shorter to make it a closer match to the original?

For the octave, I noticed if I turned the octave up on both pedals it was completely different. eventually I found that if I dial back the octave on the parentheses to about 9-10 o'clock the effect would be identical (besides the afore mentioned pulsewidth on the distortion). Anything after 1/3rd I realized that the original signal was actually disappearing until it is completely gone at 100%. Oddly enough the octave seems to be behaving as wet/dry knob with the ability to go full wet. Is this a feature of the parentheses? Or is this a bug? I really can't tell. I used the Russian diodes and I got a good matched pair I believe. Maybe I used the wrong value of potentiometer, I have not checked because I would have to take the whole thing apart to see the value printed on it and frankly, I have not decided whether I want to this this. Has anyone run into something like this? Any thoughts on what might be going on here?
 
The diodes were installed correctly (cathodes of each diode connected to the base of Q4) in the original V2 (1590BB) I saw.

Check out Page 2 of the build doc about orientation of the diodes.

Also confirm which end of your diodes has the stripe, Russian germanium diodes tend to have the stripe on the anode rather than the cathode.


To answer your question though, the two pedals should behave identical if assembled properly and with similar spec'd components... the only difference being that the Parentheses has a footswitch to toggle the octave on and off.
 
just looking at the schema, if you subbed in what you could get your hands on in the diode, transistor, and op amp department you are going to have a different time. obviously the build doc covers diode orientation but they do not discuss forward voltage measurements which would matter for the octave part of the build
 
I opened the pedal up again and verified my diodes have the proper polarity. I used D9K diodes which I believe those are the same as the original. I tested the polarity to make sure I had them in right. Also I am not nearly as interested in finding the source of the octave issue as I am finding the source of the distortion issue. The octave sound for all intents and purposes sounds perfect, the knob just behaves differently.

The distortion on the other hand, has a different sound to it. That's really what I am interested in tinkering with. I did not substitute any parts in my build. I used PF5102 transistors that I got from Antique Electronic Supply. I used an LM308N which I got from BYOC. I think I was able to get everything else from tayda/mouser. For all the box capacitors I used the red WIMA caps for all but C21 which I had to use a regular grey box capacitor for. The only ceramics I used were for C1, C14, C15, and C20.

Right now I am thinking that since the difference occurs on all three clipping modes, it's not going to be with any of the parts effected by the rotary switch. This makes me think maybe it is either the LM308, or some of the parts around the LM308. I just don't understand the circuit well enough to see what part of it is determining the pulsewidth of the distortion. If anyone has any ideas on what parts would be worth playing around with that would be awesome.
 
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