CraigGT

My favourite example of that was on a thread about getting a surf reverb effect, it took me ages to work out who Lollipop Dale was :-) Craig

I can't remember exactly but I know they're metric, M3 or M4 probably. I remember because when I built my board the Strymon's used UNC which threw me a bit. Craig

It's interesting that the chip is the mic preamp and has nothing to do with the phantom power which must be being applied externally. Interestingly the chip's datasheet mentions the need to protect it against phantom power surges and gives a suitable circuit which as far as I can see from pictures of the pcb are being implemented. Craig

Yes I turn the Blue Comp on when I want to be Gary Moore :-) Craig

Yes I ended up with a "MIDI Solutions" Merge box. It's handy because it can be powered by one of the midi in's. http://www.midisolutions.com/prodmrg.htm Craig

Your Helix could be set to Line level on the XLR's and that would not play well with the desk if you were using a channel previously set up for a mic. The soundguy should have spotted that though. Craig

That makes sense, power supply noise is referred to as ripple but I didn't realise there were separate Hum and Ripple controls. I guess it depends on what the original amps were susceptible to. But you're right, who wants buzz and hum?, especially when they're the wrong frequency :-) Craig

There is a hum parameter as part of most of the power amps, it might need turning down. It struck me as weird at first because I'm in the UK and I am used to 50Hz hum. I don't know if it's relevant but in a tube amp, power supply hum will be 2x line current frequency (100/120Hz) whereas ground hum will be 50/60Hz. Craig

I have a pair of Yamaha DSR112's under my desk but that might be overkill ;-)

Half of my Tap switch light doesn't work. I'm sure it will just need a bit of solder if I go in there again. Craig

Funny thing is that we're using all that power to recreate amps that were commonplace back then :-) Craig

It's just a thought but 50 years before 2.8 update was released, Apollo 11 was on it's way to the moon. I wonder how the two's relative computing power stacks up :-) Craig

As promised here are the pictures. The old girls https://www.dropbox.com/s/jyezh6keghfx2wr/Old Girls-1.jpg?dl=0 The young pups https://www.dropbox.com/s/bd8jdr0dkjlzgj8/Young Pups-1.jpg?dl=0 Craig

Thanks everyone, I'll post some pictures as soon as I get chance. Craig

Not really Helix related but that's how they'll get used so... When I started work in 1978 I wanted a Strat but everyone warned me off them saying they were rubbish and not worth the money (a point borne out by the absence of Custom Shop 70's models) so instead I bought a Music Man Sabre II which I still have. Fast forward to 1986 and a lunchtime stroll led to an impulse buy of a Charvel model 6 which has been my go to guitar ever since and also the last electric guitar that I bought. Now with impending semi retirement and some bonus cash I started looking around and soon decided that my preferred new guitar would be a PRS DGT, more browsing followed until I found the one which I quickly put a deposit on but I still had the feeling that my last guitar should be a Strat. So on my first day of semi retirement I headed to the shop that had my preferred Strat to reacquaint myself and it still felt very good but they didn’t want to do me a good deal which kind of left a bad taste, oh well, off to pick the PRS up from a different shop. I didn’t bother playing the PRS because I’d played it a few times before but ooh those new Les Paul Standards look nice! I left with the PRS and a very nice Les Paul Standard 50’s which they did me a very good deal on. Day two of semi retirement was a very long drive to a shop that I’d wanted to visit for a while to try and find an even better Strat (I had one in mind from their website) it turned out that it wasn’t the one but another which I’d glossed over on the website most definitely was so that came home with me too. So there you have it, 3 new guitars in 2 days does seem a bit excessive but 5 in 40 years is well below the average :-) Craig

I saw MK live the other night and everything sounded fantastic, kempers included. Craig

I'm not familiar with that movie but I'd still argue that 10 feet of cable doesn't have an impedance (other than the one on the label that determines the price :-) ) Craig

True Spikey but I suspect it has a lot more to do with the capacitance of the cable than the impedance. At work we sent 2.4 Gig's over 100M of cheap coax, it makes me sceptical of paying £100 for and SPDIF cable for my TV sound system :-) Maybe I'm too old for all of this :-) Craig

The whole 75/120 Ohm business baffles me, coming from a lifetime working in communications I know that it takes miles of cable for it to achieve it's "characteristic impedance" I really don't see how there can be a difference over 10 feet. Unless you're talking coax with BNC's but that has different connectors for 50/75 Ohm and that doesn't occur with XLR's. Craig

I'm not sure if this is widely known but I didn't know it, I just happened upon it today. So I bought a new amp, it has one channel with a foot switchable boost. I set up a footswitch to turn the boost on and off but it worked in reverse, lit was clean and unlit was boosted. After trying to find a way to invert it, I hit upon the idea of assigning the same footswitch to a gain block and sure enough it seems that the state of the block is reflected in the lit/unit state of the switch and the ext amp setting isn't. Hitting the bypass switch on the block flipped it over so now it's controlling the amp the way that I want. You live and learn! Craig

DI and Ben resolved this on FB, It is a typo, it was 53 deluxe 5C3 not a 58 and the Grammatico LaGrange is based on a 5E3 circuit. Not that I know the difference, I'm just passing it on. Craig

Maybe try using the Kinky Boost instead of the Cosmo Echo ,I believe that it's modelled on the EP Boost which is itself modelled on the Echoplex audio path. Craig

That sounds like a lucky escape, a friend plugged 12V AC into a keyboard that wanted 12V DC, I ended up changing about 12 chips and transistors, it was a hell of a job. I built some protection into that too! Craig

I think that it was your suggestion at the time Spikey. Craig

I ended up using a midi merger with the Helix feeding one input and the PC the other. Craig