focused articulate tone?

[daz]

I've come to a point now after chasing the perfect tone all this time where i have finally nailed everything that was wrong with it except one thing....focus and articulation in the tone. it's thick and righ with tight bass and the mids i like. But the focus isn't there. it's the one remaining issue. I fear i will sacrifice other details in getting it, especially the harmonic complexity which i think may hamper focus to some extent. Anyways, what are the things to look at in order to make the tone more focused so that faster passages aren't backed by a lot of garbage and will sound clear? By the way, i mean to say what to look at in the amp, not as far as external things like guitar or speakers because these are the same i always use with any amps i've had and are plenty capable of a very focused tone, as they have gotten me that in the past with many amps.

[Steve Conner]

What are the acoustics like in the room where you test it? My amps sound great in any room in the house, except the living room. It has brick walls that cause standing waves and make the sound kind of vague and blurry. My stereo suffers the same problem.

I don't know of any electronic fix for an overly reverberant room, so if that's your problem there's no point in chasing it. Try it in another room and see if it's better. If so, superglue that chassis shut

If someone asked me to make an amp more "focused" I'd try cutting bass early on in the signal chain, and boosting highs later on down it. I think you mentioned you used the EVM12L, and that's a somewhat dull sounding speaker, on account of its big heavy dustcap, that might appreciate some more highs. It has great bass and lower mids, but not much up top. When I got one, I had to mod my amp with a presence boost.

Of course more highs means more fizz, but sometimes a bit of fizz and buzz is what you need to make a tone work in a mix.

And maybe you get garbage when you play fast because of poor technique.

[daz]

Your right Steve. I know the room is part of it....it's all tile windows and hard walls and it does indeed cause this. But it's been more focused even in this room so i thought maybe there was something i could look at to help get back to the more focused tone it once had. I always thought bigger filtering would be more focused, but i'm starting to think the 100/100uf can i swapped out the 32/32uf for is somehow less focused. So i may go back to the 32/32 and see what that does. I may also tap the V1 supply from the Screen supply node to get more voltage to V1. More voltage always seems to be more articulate and right now it's quite low, but the dropping resistor is already small so i'll have to tap V1 from further downstream since i thing the PI and V2 are ok as is.

[ThermionicScott]

Are you relying on preamp stages for distortion? Perhaps you could inject some of the signal from early in the chain into a later stage (the PI, for instance), sort of like an internal bi-amping scheme. Might need to run that clean signal through some clean gain stages to keep phase from being a problem. If it worked, then you could blend some clean treble in with a somewhat dark distortion tone for less fizz.

Haven't tried this, but it works in my head...

- Scott

[cbarrow7625]

This can help, I have done it a few times. If done correctly, a small dose of positive feedforward/feedback can really increase the articulation without changing the tone. I like to tie the 3rd stage grid leak resistor to the preceding cathode through a large cap. Works particularly well if the cathode is not bypassed.

[daz]

Edit: nevermind, i found what i needed to do and all is well.