Seabed Delay

[jcpst]

Good Grief, this build made me a hot mess. It's for someone I'm a fan of, so I wanted to make a good impression. I decided to go with a seabed because he wanted simple controls.

I wanted to use black & gold, because that goes with his band's art. Until this point I have been hand-labeling pedals. I learned how to do a Tayda UV print specifically for this build. With a little help from the the forum, the end result turned out well. The color of the text wasn't quite what I was going for, but it still works.

I picked up one of those gold footswitches from LMS, but I couldn't find any specs on the reliability. So then I tried putting the gold actuator on a switch that I had the specs for. But they were just different enough that the fit wasn't right. So then, I mounted the actuator on the enclosure, and put a SPST underneath it. This almost worked. But it was ridiculous. After thorough testing, the switch would stick once in a while. Not acceptable. I tried grinding down the end of the SPST for a better fit inside the gold actuator. But I don't have the right gear for that and it was taking forever. The process of grinding the SPST actually made it look better with the gold, and it has a cool texture.



I tested out 10 different PT2399s and couldn't find one quiet enough. So then I switched gears and built a Schumaker DM-3. After putting it together, I realized my LEVEL and DELAY pots were swapped compared to the Seabed. I decided to run leads to switch the positions. Since the board wasn't holding the pots in place anymore, I drilled alignment holes for the tab on the pots.



I was having an awful time getting rid of the clock noise on the DM-3. I tried all sorts of silly things after I couldn't get it by ear, like using an oscilloscope plugin via Max4Live. Later I realized it might not help to have the leads for the delay pot and the level pot to be overlapping each other. I set it to the side to mess with another day. I had some time to figure it out, he was out for the month on a leg of a world tour.

Eventually I flip-flopped and took out the DM-3 for a friend who specifically wants a BBD delay. I'll write that build report later. For this build it didn't matter if was analog or not.

I went through my 10 PT2399s again. Still not satisfied. Also, the level of the dry signal was louder than unity. Replacing R3 with a 500K trim pot worked great for that. I took a probe and started checking the audio path. Nothing stood out. Finally, I had the bright idea of pulling out my only other PT2399 delay, a Dart Rift. I set them up for an A/B comparison. Holy shit my Dark Rift was noisy. The difference was huge. This brought me back down to earth and I realized the Seabed was just fine.



It goes in the mail Monday. I hope he likes it!

 

[Aleph Null]

Way to persevere! It looks good.

Having fought a few PT2399s, I've come to the conclusion that you really can't expect more than 300ms at the most before they get noisy.

 

[leadfoot]

Very cool build and it sounds like you learned a lot!

Unfortunately, a lot of pedals are just noisy because of the limitations of the components they're built on and it just becomes part of their charm. For truly silent and clean operation you'll probably have to move to DSP chips but then you lose the charm of analog circuits.

 

[jcpst]

Unfortunately, a lot of pedals are just noisy because of the limitations of the components they're built on and it just becomes part of their charm.

Yep, I think what happened here was not giving myself a reference point, and then I overthought it.

And thanks! Ultimately I’m happy with the way it turned out.

 

[owlexifry]

Holy shit my Dark Rift was noisy.

it appears to be like this (perhaps inadvertently) by design.
but it can be remedied. i had to change some values to reduce the input signal from clipping the PT2399, as it comes in way too hot and clips with the stock values. (mods described here).

Unfortunately, a lot of pedals are just noisy because of the limitations of the components they're built on and it just becomes part of their charm. For truly silent and clean operation you'll probably have to move to DSP chips but then you lose the charm of analog circuits.

i get the feeling a lot of people that shit on PT2399/belton bricks are probably using/testing them with direct/digital rigs and/or headphones, which really does make the artefacts / background noise stand out.

fucken oath i can hear that shit in a DAW. I'm not denying it.

but guess what? as soon as you plug one of these into a real amp and listen to real guitar speakers with real ears, it's pretty much all gone.
i cannot hear any of it enough to give a shit.

 

[jcpst]

but guess what? as soon as you plug one of these into a real amp and listen to real guitar speakers with real ears, it's pretty much all gone.

Totally. I normally test with a little 5-watt princeton style amp. It’s very clean at lower levels, and made this stick out.

 

[YourGuitarist]

it appears to be like this (perhaps inadvertently) by design.
but it can be remedied. i had to change some values to reduce the input signal from clipping the PT2399, as it comes in way too hot and clips with the stock values. (mods described here).


i get the feeling a lot of people that shit on PT2399/belton bricks are probably using/testing them with direct/digital rigs and/or headphones, which really does make the artefacts / background noise stand out.

fucken oath i can hear that shit in a DAW. I'm not denying it.

but guess what? as soon as you plug one of these into a real amp and listen to real guitar speakers with real ears, it's pretty much all gone.
i cannot hear any of it enough to give a shit.

Filtering! Not enough filtering in the wet path. Electrosmash specifically recommends rolloff at like 1k for pt2399s and I find my Belton build fine bc I low passed at 3kish. People go wild for *sparkle* at like 6k not realizing most guitar amps beam like crazy above 2k and guitar doesn't have much musical content above 4k anyway.