ilovefuzz.com

I got one of these so I can run keyboards and/or my cell phone into a phantom octave. before, the phantom octave would pass the signal kinda cleanish without adding fuzz. I had assumed that its just designed to work with guitar and I was pretty right about that. I dialed in the impedance about half way and WAAAAM! lovely nasty warm buzzing bass. the drone on my cell phone is set to A# below E on bass. no problem. I'm loving it. I was gonna sell it but now I am all

I just hope that this helps anyone who is having the same problem.

Why the HELL have I not run my phone through my pedal board? Was my first thought when I saw Ipads...some how didn't transfer over to smaller tech

How mutch was it?

$120 shipped to the USA. its $110 if your in australia. took about 2 weeks to get it. he has info on his site about baked on lazertran waterslide decals over powder coat that is very useful to me. its a karma loop I suppose. having the pedal in my hand I can actually see the finished product with the decal. its a 4site enclosure and you know how rough they are. one of the knobs is sticking way out from the pot. not sure why he has a mismatch of parts like that. I would never let something go out like that BUT its fully functional and I'm very happy with it.

well, that's cool. now lemme see the impedance circuitry so i's can build it into a few pedals.

eatyourguitar wrote:
I got one of these so I can run keyboards and/or my cell phone into a phantom octave. before, the phantom octave would pass the signal kinda cleanish without adding fuzz. I had assumed that its just designed to work with guitar and I was pretty right about that. I dialed in the impedance about half way and WAAAAM! lovely nasty warm buzzing bass. the drone on my cell phone is set to A# below E on bass. no problem. I'm loving it. I was gonna sell it but now I am all

I just hope that this helps anyone who is having the same problem.

What, a phone? Are You CRAZY - me likes You style a-plenty!

sutarappa wrote:well, that's cool. now lemme see the impedance circuitry so i's can build it into a few pedals.

its got epoxy residue on the metal cap. I am almost certain there is some gooping going un under that metal thing sticking out. no markings. obviously a gooper.

I'd be more than happy to share the a few DIY impedance transformer designs I found. although I haven't tested any of them.

i wonder if this would also be useful with guitar for bumping up the input impedance so you could place the Octave/Ring farther down the signal chain without screwing up the effect.

thats a capacitance problem that happens when you have like 10 or more pedals all true bypass and no battery in the guitar. it can turn the best guitar/gear into a pile of shit. what you want is a zvex super hard on aka "crackle OK". before I knew about the zvex, I purchased a clean boost from creation audio labs that does the same thing. the input of the first pedal in your chain should be a cleanboost/preamp/buffer or whatever that is designed to work best when plugged directly to the output of a passive guitar. if not, when all your pedals are bypassed, you will have like 40 feet of cable carrying a weak signal that is much lower in volume and higher in impedance than what you would want to drive such a long cable. this theory is very popular among guitar techs and pedal builders. also, lower capacitance cable like mogami can help a lot although the overpriced cable debate will continue.

well, no. the Phantom Octave/Phantom Ring's left side functions on impedance, not capacitance; Tom is quite clear about this on the FuzzHugger site. apparently the Phantoms need to see an input impedance in the typical guitar range (i.e. a value in single/low double-digit kohms) for the left channel octave-down and fuzz to function properly; per my research a typical stompbox's output impedance is more in the hundreds of ohms. it doesn't help to put a buffer in front of the Phantom, and Tom explicitly instructs not to use buffered-bypass pedals before the Phantoms.

Oh in that case yes. You and Tom are %100 correct. Its his pedal. And thats exactly why i bought it. But the thing is a line to guitar transformer. Its adjustable but in the middle I can nail the sweet spot on my phantom octave. I totally agree that that it works and its necesarry. But it is designed for a line level/impedance input. I use it on dj equipment samplers keyboards cell phones. I dont know if its gonna work on your board. Ill try it with guitar and report back.

what would help most, i think, would be to compare by a) running the guitar straight into the Arcade and then b) running the guitar into a couple of other boxes before the Arcade (the other boxes needn't be on, they just have to be in the circuit), then into the impedance transformer, and finally into the Arcade, and varying the impedance transformer setting to see if you can duplicate the behavior of the Arcade in test a).

The problem is two fold, your guitar signal will loose volume running through the transformer and you may overshoot your target impedance of 6k to 16k. Although it is adjustable i would have to test it. Also, it depends what the output impedance is of the pedal thats pushing the transformer. You can figure it out from the schematic. Just follow the last resistor on the output and go backwards, adding up resistors till you hit the last opamp or transistor. Thats usually a good guess for output impedance. So if you have an opamp with just a 10k resistor and a cap on the output of a boss pedal and that goes into the transformer, your gonna have the output of the transformer at 30k to 100k. Its just a multiplier really. Thats why i can plug in a cell phone at 8 ohms and get 8k out.

i've been getting some output impedance information from pedal spec sheets; it's good to have a way to calculate the OI when that info isn't stated.

sounds like it's a lot simpler to just reconfigure the guitar board so the Phantom is first in the chain. the transformer's still an interesting device to have available, though, particularly since i also use keys, CD decks, and other stuff at times. this is fascinating...thanks.

eatyourguitar wrote:I'd be more than happy to share the a few DIY impedance transformer designs I found. although I haven't tested any of them.

Cool. If you might point a body in the right direction...