Attenuator differences?

[SupaTmu]

The case here is that I want make my amp quiter when I record at home. I have Koch Multitone 50 and it has fairly good rec-out. Signal goes trough the poweramp and then to recout so you have to play loud to get that great tube sound.

I was about to build Bridged-T attenuator, but then I found two other types. L-pad and PI attenuators. They all are easy to build and not too expensive, but what is the main difference? I've heard that Koch Loadbox is PI attenuator, not a fact just hear say. Have someone build one of these and how do they sound?

-Teemu

[Mike Burgundy]

there's a lot to be said about attenuators, but if they all are cheap to build you might just want to try them all.
Be aware that speakers are a big part of the sound! A lot of these "amp-DI-boxes"  incorporate some kind of filtering to approximate speaker response. If you want to go deep, you need to emulate *what the amplifier sees* when it's driving a real speaker: impedance and loading can change radically with frequency.
If you give us a couple of links I'm sure some more guys will chip in, I personally don't have experience with (DIY)attenuators. There's a bunch of good DIY speaker sims around (ROG, AMZ, marshall, they're all here - do some digging in the schematics sections), which mostly appear to incorporate a high-end rolloff and a 100Hz or so hump. This does give a nice sound.

[SupaTmu]

Thanks Mike!

Multitone has a speakersim and I'm happy with that, for now. So, only thing I want now is to be able to play it in my bedroom and record it with my computer.

I found this one instruction for building attenuators. Here's the link.

http://amps.zugster.net/articles/attenuation/

Bridged-T is the one I'm thinking of building. This techguy I know said that he usually makes PI attenuators so I was wondering what's the deal. I haven't seen him for a while so that why I'm asking this here.

And here's PI-attenuator.

http://home.sandiego.edu/~ekim/e194rfs01/minl_atten/minlosatten.html#top

-Teemu

[jjs]

For information about designing reactive loads check this link:

http://www.aikenamps.com/spkrload.html

(The page has many other informative articles in the tech section)