Stepped Attenuators

[Stuart Polansky]

Has anyone tried these? Series resistor style, surface mount resistors.

Gonna try them as high and low frequency output level controls in a crossover. One will doubtlessly be wide open in normal use.

Stuart

Attachments

[Pelliott321]

What is the source

[Stuart Polansky]

eBay, Hong Kong

[Stuart Polansky]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/190844814249

[Pelliott321]

Well at that price it is worth a try.

[SoundMods]

Has anyone tried these? Series resistor style, surface mount resistors.

Gonna try them as high and low frequency output level controls in a crossover. One will doubtlessly be wide open in normal use.

Stuart

You could go with a decent quality pot and configure a shunt attenuator that keeps the pot out of the signal path and puts the signal through one high-quality resistor such as Vishay bulk films or Dale metal films.

I did the same thing that BAT did many decades ago with a PS Audio Pre-amp and was unexpectedly surprised with the much improved sound quality.

Attachments

BAT 3Ki Shunt Attenuator.pdf

(546.85 KiB) Downloaded 251 times

[GaryB]

Has anyone tried these? Series resistor style, surface mount resistors.

Gonna try them as high and low frequency output level controls in a crossover. One will doubtlessly be wide open in normal use.

Stuart

I've played around quite a bit with ladder attenuators and series style attenuators, both with leaded resistors and SMD resistors. When using leaded resistors for the attenuator, I found that a ladder attenuator sounded considerably better. But the SMD series attenuators sounded just as good as the ladder attenuator. Even the cheap ones from Hong Kong. So I wave my hands and say that the extra lead inductance of conventional through hole resistors adds up when one has a large number of them in series. SMD parts are closer to an ideal resistor since they don't have leads and the extra associated inductance. Whether or not you believe my rationalization, I do think that the sound results are clear and reproducible.

--Gary

[Stuart Polansky]

Thanks Gary, that's what I was looking for.

I have P&G pots as well as LDR attenuators, but duplicating them in multiples for high and low level outputs of a crossover would be a daunting task and NOT fit in my enclosure.

Thanks again.

Stuart