Les Paul Lover wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 8:54 pm
Phlowen wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:47 pm
Sootio wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:42 pm
You can plainly hear where each gain stage kicks in. I suppose that's the point where the output of one stage becomes the input of the next stage, thus increasing the gain. That's why it's called cascading gain.
This is my understanding of it as well, though now I'm second guessing myself as Les Paul Lover isn't usually mistaken...
Crikey..... I'm so often mistaken.....
Sootio wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:42 pm
Les Paul Lover wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:27 am
All the gain stages are on at all times. Your signal will flow through all 4 triode of the 2 ECC83 at all times, regardless of actual gain.
You can plainly hear where each gain stage kicks in. I suppose that's the point where the output of one stage becomes the input of the next stage, thus increasing the gain. That's why it's called cascading gain.
Yes, they're called cascading gain stages and all flow through one another..... all of the time.
They're active at all times, and the gain level you set dictates how much signal flows through all four.
I used to think like you- especially on the RV50 where the gain has some obvious notches....
I definitely hear notches. This is my understanding of how it works...
"As we’ve touched on already, a single gain stage can be designed to squeeze the maximum amount of gain from that preamp tube, but most of the amps we consider high gain use several gain stages chained together—something called “cascading gain”—to achieve a hotter signal than one or two more vintage-style gain stages are capable of on their own. In amps of this type, the saturated overdrive sound we hear is typically produced by pushing early gain stages to very high levels, often chaining one into the other to continually drive the gain higher and enable desired levels of distortion, and then reining in the signal at the end of the line to create the desired final output level.
There’s a broad range of high-gain designs on the market, and different makers’ amps often do things in quite different ways. It’s also worth noting that they achieve a pretty wide range of gain levels within what we broadly call “high gain.” For example, today’s metal player might not consider a late-’70s Marshall 2204 high-gain at all, whereas it would have sounded extremely hot to the average rocker of its era.
Familiar names that typify the high-gain genre are Bogner, Soldano, Diezel, Fryette, EVH, ENGL, Fuchs, and, of course, good old Marshall and Mesa/Boogie—plus far, far more than we can list here. Most follow some evolution of circuitry that began with the original Mesa/Boogie designs, which chain together several gain stages. By increasing the gain incrementally from stage to stage (usually with controls labeled drive, gain, lead, or even just volume placed between them to govern how much signal from the previous stage is passed along to the next as you ramp up the signal all along the chain), designers can both conjure much higher levels of gain than a one- or two-stage preamp and still provide the player with the ability to dial in anything from the minimum to the maximum of that preamp’s capabilities."
My phrase "second gain stage kicking in" is probably oversimplified, but it seems adequate to describe what I'm hearing.