talbany wrote:High plates have more gain and more headroom/swing (due to the larger voltage drop across the plate resistor) and low plates have less gain and less headroom clip harder sooner..IMO it's really hard to hear the difference in gain between them (at the same RP RK ratio) as some might confuse gain with distortion, but you can feel it in the amount of compression..Impedance of the plate resistor in combination with plate resistance also factors into the tone..Generally high plates can have more low end..
IMO you might need to open the OD trimmer slightly to compensate for distortion levels going from low plate to high plate..But only slightly (around 5-10k on the pot)..If it's a drastic shift, like having to up the trimmer value then something else could be wrong..If you go to the higher value OD trimmer expect more gain distortion but also expect more low end response due to the shifting of the -3dB knee!!..So you may have tweak the bypass values on the OD
Tony
This doesn't sound undesirable to me...might be the way to go.
Thanks for the info Tony.
talbany wrote:..IMO it's really hard to hear the difference in gain between them (at the same RP RK ratio) as some might confuse gain with distortion, but you can feel it in the amount of compression..Impedance of the plate resistor in combination with plate resistance also factors into the tone..Generally high plates can have more low end..
The added low end makes sense now, I used to find it was easy to get a flabby (in my opinion) bass .
I am guilty of misuse of the terms gain and distortion at times for sure. As you said, I can tell that this low plate sustains much more than I would expect on single notes. I like this part of what I have. When this was the high plate, I got that violin, compression sustain, and harmonics that show up later on a note, but I had to pick really light to clean things up. I probably would have left this as was except I did not like the clean channel much, so I thought I would try the low plate.
Two bros have said "maybe something else is wrong" so I am going to see if somethings amiss. This weekend I'll do some snooping and measuring to see if something pops up. I have to admit, although as I said before I'm looking forward to learning, right now I wish I didn't have to deal with this and could just play it...
