Thermionic Deluxe background noise/hum/hiss

[ferdinandstrat]

I am experiencing quite a lot of background noise from this pedal, even while enclosed. I am using a wall wart and I am not daisy chaining anything. Several higher gain pedals produced much less background noise than the Deluxe using said wall wart and I've read quite a few times online that the F***dM*n tends to be a bit on the noisier side

Is the issue inherent to the pedals or is there a way to remedy this?

 

[Willybomb]

Just joining in on this thread.

My Thermionic Deluxe is a little noisy on the BE-OD side. The Dirty Shirley side is dead quiet. My Brown Betty is a little quieter than the TD, and that has a lot of offboard wiring as I added gain pot switching for dual channels. I've added a klon buffer on vero to both the BB and TD to kill squeal (which can happen when they're maxed out). The trim pots in the TD are both at 50%, which is how they arrived. The trim pot in the BB is adjusted to get some differentiation between the two gain pots as a high/low option (too high on the gain trim and there's little to no variation).

What I've found is that if I stick my DS-1 in front of the TD, the TD is dead quiet in both channels. I'm going to try out a boss buffer on vero to see that that will work rather than the Klon.

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

Do you get the noise with nothing plugged into the input?

 

[Willybomb]

Yeah. If there's nothing plugged in and the pedal isn't bypassed there's plenty of noise. Took it to band praco today, and while it sounds fantastic, it's pretty noisy compared to a number of my other drives/builds.

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

My Betty is dead quiet. All of the BE-OD based pedals should be very quiet. If the "noise" is primarily hiss, then it's a noisy opamp, noisy diode, dirty board, bad solder joint or a cap or resistor failing. If the "noise" is primarily hum, then it's a grounding or power power supply issue. Does the noise increase substantially when you turn the GAIN up? Does the TIGHT control affect the noise? Are your opamps socketed? Would you like to post a picture or two? Do you have an audio probe? I know, I ask as lotta questions for someone from L.A.