shatteredsquare
Power User
Back in choir days, there was a term called something along the lines of "key fatigue"... where after you've been singing in one key for long enough in rehearsal, your mind sort of gets numb to that key. People start wobbling off pitch, it gets hard to tune with another section, things start to sound less than stellar.
The fail safe way to fix it at that point in rehearsal was for the director to change keys, either up a half step or down a half step. All of a sudden the same passages you've been working on all sound fresh, your ears can easily pick up on pitch subtitles that were before mushing together, and it's easy to tune in with the other sections.
I'm not sure what the power tube mismatch equates to at 0.00, weather or not they are 'perfectly balanced', as in mathematically identical, or just 'within tube factory tolerances.' What I do know is that if you bump power tube mismatch up or down by just a little, 0.10 or 0.20, up or down, it makes enough audible/tangible difference as if to take the amp from the territory of being a "model of a reference amp", into the territory of "Cliff C. traced the circuit of a Dual Rectifier I bought from a guy on craigslist."
Going past +/- 0.30 in either direction does start to degrade the sound a bit...it can handle going down past -0.30 ok, but going up past +0.30 sounds like...logically, it's time to buy new tubes. But between +0.30 and -0.30 there is so much available subtle variation at increments of 0.001, that effectively make the amp...if they were on a shelf in a studio next to each other, all with the same circuit...a different amp.
+/- 0.30 in either direction from zero amounts to no less than 600 (SIX HUNDRED) variations of naturally occurring real world amplifier tonal variation. It is subtle....if you can't tell a difference, I'm wrong. Don't use zero, your amp is in there!
somebody help me with math, how many thousands are in .300
The fail safe way to fix it at that point in rehearsal was for the director to change keys, either up a half step or down a half step. All of a sudden the same passages you've been working on all sound fresh, your ears can easily pick up on pitch subtitles that were before mushing together, and it's easy to tune in with the other sections.
I'm not sure what the power tube mismatch equates to at 0.00, weather or not they are 'perfectly balanced', as in mathematically identical, or just 'within tube factory tolerances.' What I do know is that if you bump power tube mismatch up or down by just a little, 0.10 or 0.20, up or down, it makes enough audible/tangible difference as if to take the amp from the territory of being a "model of a reference amp", into the territory of "Cliff C. traced the circuit of a Dual Rectifier I bought from a guy on craigslist."
Going past +/- 0.30 in either direction does start to degrade the sound a bit...it can handle going down past -0.30 ok, but going up past +0.30 sounds like...logically, it's time to buy new tubes. But between +0.30 and -0.30 there is so much available subtle variation at increments of 0.001, that effectively make the amp...if they were on a shelf in a studio next to each other, all with the same circuit...a different amp.
+/- 0.30 in either direction from zero amounts to no less than 600 (SIX HUNDRED) variations of naturally occurring real world amplifier tonal variation. It is subtle....if you can't tell a difference, I'm wrong. Don't use zero, your amp is in there!
somebody help me with math, how many thousands are in .300
Last edited: