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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Transformer-based volume control v. low-resistence attenuator? posted by KCHANG on April 1, 2002 at 14:33:10:
It's real hard to judge a low resistor attenuator against a tranformer attenuator without hearing this. I have judged the autoformer step attenuator against a 100K L-Pad, and no question about it, the autoformer won.If your resistors are good, if your impedance is that low, if you use L-Pad ladder attenuators instead of series attenuators, I am going to make a prediction about the relative performances from what I hear with low series R attenuation. At 300 ohms you ought to get the resistor attenuator to sound better so long as you are not causing the source to distort more because of the tough load. If you were driving it from a tube, you would need higher impedance than 300 ohms, and you might have a tubed CD or phono some day.
With a low impedance like that, an autoformer step attenuator can offer you real voltage gain, like +9 dB, if you send the input to the -9 dB tap and take the output off the 0 dB tap. If you don't need the gain, don't need a high impedance, the advantage is not clear for using the autoformer, except you might like the softened distortion effect of the magnetic core. Or you might hate it.
Kurt
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Follow Ups
- Re: Transformer-based volume control v. low-resistence attenuator? - Kurt Strain 15:03:50 04/01/02 (0)