A regular high impedance input, like pedals and amps have, is perfectly happy being driven directly from a low impedance output, and will be quieter than if you add unnecessary series resistance (the Jenson "impedance" knob).įront. A lot of recording engineers think you need to make your signal high impedance to hook it up to a high impedance input, but they are wrong. I wasn't interested in the impedance knob, but one could add it if you needed to address the special case of using fuzz faces and similar vintage fuzzes that rely on the high output impedance of a guitar. I used Jenson's values for the resistor (51 ohms) and cap (.01uF) in the ground lift switch. The XLR male could be used as a thru, or one could use the box backwards, as a DI, in a pinch (as long as the attenuator was all the way up). The other problem the special reamp box addresses is simply one of connectors, this one has XLR, male and female, as well as 1/4" TRS wired in parallel for the input, because you never know. With digital playback you want a healthy signal coming out of your converters so you aren't losing resolution, so having an analog attenuation stage (volume knob) is great because you can get that without slamming the input of the amp or effect, which is built for quieter, guitar signals. Another problem is of matching levels, as line level is a bit louder than guitar. It uses a DPDT switch to "true bypass" the transformer, so there isn't any loading on the input except the 10K attenuator. On this design there is a switch to take the transformer out of the circuit, in case you don't need it, as I'm a believer there's no reason to add unnecessary electronics when you have something that sounds good. Anything over 30 ft or so and it seems like you start getting noticeable noise with guitar cables. Also a transformer performs noise rejection by turning a balanced signal into an unbalanced signal, which helps noise for long cable runs, like through a snake. Here the isolation transformer comes in handy, and is sometimes the only solution that works 100%. Some computers make a lot of weird robot chirps that show up as noise on the ground connecting the equipment. One problem is groundloops from connecting grounded recording equipment to a grounded amp, especially if they are plugged into different outlets. The specialized reamping box comes into play when you have problems. Sometimes you don't, and can save your time. One question that gets brought up with reamping is whether you even need a special box to put in between the line output of the computer/interface/tape machine and an amp or pedal. Also you can use metal film resistors and have a higher quality attenuation stage, as pots are usually carbon comp. It uses a ~10K 12 step attenuator for the output to the amp, rather than a volume knob, the idea being that often with recording it is better to trade options for being able to get reproducible results, especially if you need to go back and punch something in later. There was a question recently about reamp boxes, here is a design with a couple minor bells and whistles that could be helpful for someone gearing up to do some serious reamping.
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