1 meg Volume pot in a 18 watt Lite II?

[rockybottom16]

I just finished my first non-tweed type amp - an 18 watt lite II w/SS rectifier. I built it in a chassis that used to house a 5F2A. I didn't realize while I was building it that the 18 watt layout/schematic calls for 5ooK pots so I just left the 1M pots in there from the Princeton. The amp works and sounds great and is whisper quiet at idle. But it seems a little overly bright, especially when you start to crank it. My question is: are the 1M pots making it a little brighter than normal? I have some 500K pots, but I don't want to mess around changing them unless they are making a significant difference. I've tamed overly bright amps before just by bypassing a plate resistor with a small cap. Should I just do that with this amp and be done? Or will it be worth the time to change the pots? Thanks for your help!

[stormbringer]

The 1M pot is the load for the preceding gain stage and also factors in to setting the high-pass filter cutoff for the preceding coupling cap. I don't think it'll be a big change in frequency in practice, however, so I think you can leave in the 1M pot if noise isn't an issue.

[loudthud]

You could just tack 1 Meg resistors across the pots end to end to see if it makes any difference. I'm guessing it would make the amp slightly brighter still with a little less bass. The cap across the plate resistor would definately work.