[blipblop]

My once beautiful sounding PIMETA is now distorting. If I drop the volume the distortion goes away. Is this a normal characteristic of a dying battery?

 

[Rizumu]

Quote:

Originally posted by blipblop My once beautiful sounding PIMETA is now distorting. If I drop the volume the distortion goes away. Is this a normal characteristic of a dying battery?

It has been on all the battery amps I've owned. New batteries should do the trick.

 

[blipblop]

Phew. That's what I thought - I didn't do anything to it.

 

[tangent]

If replacing the batteries fixes the sonic problems, what you were hearing was clipping. Learn to recognize it: it's sometimes helpful when troubleshooting to be able to tell clipping from other sorts of distortion.

 

[blipblop]

Thanks tangent. Although I don't know why its called clipping if that is indeed the sound I heard, since it was more like a "corroded" distorting of the sound than any clipping nouse.

 

[guzzler]

it was clipping, if you describe it as corroded, very good word for it in fact!

It means that the opamp output can't swing far enough, so instead of a smooth sinusoidal wave, you get something approaching a square wave where there is not enough voltage to complete the peak of the wave. Indeed, you can make a cheap square wave generator by using an opamp set with a very high gain and a low supply voltage, especially useful for simple digital circuits...

g

edit: typo

 

[tangent]

Quote:

it was more like a "corroded" distorting of the sound than any clipping nouse.

It sounds like you have preexisting notions of what clipping sounds like. Perhaps you are thinking of the soft clipping you get with tube equipment? With solid-state, clipping is very harsh sounding. Crunchy.

 

[blipblop]

You're right - I didn't even notice that I made an assumption. The reason I did is because I have an amp for a few of my synthesizers and when they clip (as indicated also by an LED lighting up), there is a clip/plopping sound as if the speaker is over extending. Most definitely not resembling what I heard from my PIMETA.

 

[tangent]

Those amps might have some kind of clever clipping behavior that isn't actually hard clipping, possibly in order to protect the speakers. Your PIMETA was going into pure hard clipping.