Too much gain

Hi, I am have had this clone Preamp built up board for a while & although it sound very good I cannot overcome the gain of the unit, It is just to high to early. I have now tried a 50K pot (that is what the original was, or so the label said) 100K & 10K & the result is the same for all. I can only get to a 9 'o' clock position & the vol is to high.

can anyone advise how the effectively reduce the vol. I have heard you can do it with resistors, but am not sure how to accomplish this.

Cheers for any replies
 
Hi, Thanks for the replies, i have checked all my 4 spare pots & they are all 50/50 so must be linear. My local component supplier (such as it is) lists a 50K log pot, so I will pop down town tomorrow & hopefully they have one in store, or at least can order one in.

Tried the resistors before the pot, actually used higher values as that was I had, shunt was 50% of main resistor. it only made a very small reduction, say now at 10 'o' clock.

cheers Derek
 
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Joined 2011
You may be better off with your present linear pot, with added resistors from the wipers to ground to make it quasi-log.
The tracking will be better than most stereo volume pots, since linear pots track very well compared to log types.
Use precision metal film resistors from the wipers to ground, and use about 10% of the pot value for the resistor to start.
 
what abouth this:
1653633556327.png

4:1. a pair for $55, plus $ 15 ship - max input about 2V RMS I guess. It's permalloy, sensitive and very wide-band.
but silly to make a preamp than then discard the gain.
Why not take the route of a 1:2 transformer and use that for 'gain'?
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But
You made a clone. The clone is a preamp with feedback.
The sensible thing is to change the feedback resistors right thre. For instance, the feedback is 20k/2k. Then change the 20k to 5 k. See what happens. Easy to solder a resistor parallen on the 20k resistor of my example.
 
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Well nothing has worked so far. I loading the CD input with resistors. it made a little reduction but nowhere new enough.
You can make a simple voltage divider at the input with two resistors for any level of reduction needed.

Divider.png


For example, if Z1 is 100K and Z2 is 20K then you get a 6:1 reduction in voltage at the output. With a little experimentation you should be able to find a ratio that works for your circuit. The total (Z1 +Z2) is not critcal but try to keep it in the range of 50K to 100K so, similar to the volume pot value.
 
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