Buildreport; Ruby with tonecontrol

[Krinor]

Well actually a treble rolloff control...
After having built a regular Ruby, a Fetzer Ruby and a Bassman mod. Ruby I decided to try my hand at one with a tonecontrol.
I used the one found in the Noisy Cricket schematic available at the Beavis Audio Research site. Check it out yourself at:
http://www.beavisaudio.com/

Here's my amp:



And a closeup:



I really love these knobs. Thery're from Smallbear and cost a little more than the average, but they're well worth it IMO.
For all you gut lovers, here are the insides:



I put everything except the resistors on sockets so that I can play around with different  value caps etc.



Here's a closeup of the insides, this is my cleanest job to date.  :



The pots are from left to right: Volume, Gain, Tone.You can see how the tonecontrol connects to the volume control and on through the 0.1 uF cap. and to ground also through a 0.1 uF cap. I find that this gives a mellow treble rolloff which is barely audible when the amp is driven clean. But when I use a distortion unit in front the tone control produces a bit more effect. This is a very simple device. If anyone has some good suggestions (other part values ?), please comment. Thanks for browsing.

Did I forget to say that I polished the enclosure ? 

[pseen]

Wow, that is smooth! Can I hear it?

[Krinor]

Sure! If I only knew where to upload a soundclip. 

[Steben]

Sure! If I only knew where to upload a soundclip. 

Gallery?
You can always send it to anyone here for posting.

[Alex C]

Very clean, inside and out.  Thanks for the gut shots too!  Very nice work.

-Alex

[bancika]

looks very clean, but one concern: using pin sockets for caps like that is great for prototyping but it might be a problem later. I mean, you'll probably be fine, nobody's gonna stomp on it or something, just it's not as sturdy as soldered component...

[Krinor]

looks very clean, but one concern: using pin sockets for caps like that is great for prototyping but it might be a problem later. I mean, you'll probably be fine, nobody's gonna stomp on it or something, just it's not as sturdy as soldered component...

I know  My Ruby's sit on their own little shelf. Noone messes with them.
I figured I would need this one to be like a little Ruby laboratory where I could easily experiment with it to see what other tricks it might play. Mods for this little amp are not abundant. Maybe I come up with something interesting in my utter noobness? 

[aron]

very nice!

[Krinor]

Thanks Aron 

[ambulancevoice]

great job!!!
why did you socket the power filter cap???

[Krinor]

great job!!!
why did you socket the power filter cap???

Ha,ha I really don't know! Somehow I was just so obsessed with the idea of putting in sockets for everything. 
At first I thought I'd put the input and output caps on sockets since playing around with them is what really makes a difference - but along the way I thought (or maybe rather didn't think at all) -what the heck, and socketed everything. 

[brett]

Hi
very nice build.  futuristic

While it is a cool design in most respects, IMO the 0.1uF cap leading to the 10k volume pot is too small.  It causes a substantial loss of bass. A minimum of 0.22uF is advisable, and 0.47uF or 1uF is better.

A useful rule of thumb is that capacitance (in uF) x resistance (in kohms) must be more than 2, should be 5, and for bass guitar etc should be 10.  These give fc of about 90 Hz, 40 Hz and 16 Hz, respectively.  The low E on a guitar is about 80 Hz, so you can see that R x C of 5 is about right.
cheers

[greigoroth]

That is the sweetest amp Kristian! The design is just so... clean!

I want one! - just have to learn to solder first...

[Krinor]

Thanks for the input Brett. This is my first experiment with a tone control, so you'll have to excuse my relative ignorance. I will try those values in a few days. Right now I'm posting from my mobile, writing with my left hand since I have had surgery done on my right shoulder today. No guitar playing for me the next couple of weeks... Again, thanks for the remarks. Any further thoughts ?

[Krinor]

I recently changed the capacitors on the tonecontrol on this one. Thanks to Brett for his thoughtfull comments. My tonecontrol now sounds much better. The 100k pot was way too large though. I changed it first to 25k and then to 5k which spreads the treble rolloff nicely over the full rotation of the pot. I just thought I'd share this with other noobs like myself who want to implement a tonecontrol on this amp or on the Little Gem.