Help Me With Signal Voltage?

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MrShake
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Help Me With Signal Voltage?

Post by MrShake » Fri Aug 27, 2021 3:55 am

Ok, so this is half amp, half effects, but you maniacs have never steered me wrong in here.

I just refurbed an old Kustom head. I love it, there's a thread in amps about it, feel free to read. Dare I say, it's a masterpiece.

It's a 1969 solid state, and I've heard that a super-hot signal is enough to blow the input transistors, which I don't wanna do. I've read that +1v will do it, but I'm undereducated on the real-world practical meaning of that. I'm assuming I can hook multimeter up to the cable coming off my board and measure?

Example: I've always been a "pedal platform" guy. Clean amps, high headroom. Clean tone, then clanky rat set just above unity, then a Superfuzz just a shade above that, then a Muff just a little bit over that. Could go from clean to any of them and not seem like a HUGE volume jump. So, I'm not too worried abt that. I'm not a "push the preamp with crazy boost" (gain down, vol cranked, TS style), but I do up the output from one pedal to the next for a slight increase in every box down the line.

But we close our set with a song where I turn a DD-5 up to 2sec, max feedback, max volume, and a big loopy noise wash. Would something like that be able to blow these transistors?

I've read that some humbuckers get up over +1v all by themselves. I've got a little "vol pot in a box" I built so I can balance the levels by turn the "pedalboard master volume" down and turn the amp up more for a cooler input signal and reclaimed volume, but that's a fix to a problem I don't understand if I have yet.

Anybody ever hit a vintage Kustom with hot signal? Anybody ever have to watch their signal voltage into their amp?

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