Beastly SRPP?

[billings]

I've been messing around with booster circuits lately, and the last one I built was a minibooster.  I played with it stock and enjoyed it pretty good, but it didn't exactly make me miss my MOSFET booster.  Twiddling with the trimpot I had on Q2's source didn't do much for me, either - although I'll grant that all I had was a 10k, so I wasn't able to discern much in the 0-1k region.

So I thought I'd add the 1k resistor between Q1 source and Q2 drain to make it an SRPP as described by R.G. here, and result is not what I'd call a booster.  I briefly searched the archives and only found one other thread that mentioned this as a "greasy overdrive", and that's what I'd call this - a beefy single-stage overdrive with more than enough gain.  I guess it goes without saying that I used J201s.

Is my experience unusual here?  Or are ckts like the BSIAB2 generally preferred to the SRPP for getting that kind of crank out of minibooster-style stages?

While I'm at it I would like to denounce pad per hole as an inefficient method of circuit construction.

[WGTP]

Check out the old forum.  IIRC this was a point of debate.  Try your 1K trim pot where you put the 1K resistor.  Also, the cap value in the middle of the booster has a lot of effect on the tone.  Try as small as .01uF.   

[jrc4558]

http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/fuzz/syrupp.gif

[billings]

Well it looks like all the information beyond R.G.'s SRPP article and the extremely brief treatment of the topic on AMZ is on the AMZ CD-ROM.  Owel.

Still, it's very confusing to see so many references to the minibooster and so little to read about it.  Might as well spring for the pdfs...

Oh, and it's a 10k trimmer, not a 1k!  So no wonder I wasn't getting anywhere "tweaking" that source resistor.  I like the gain and distortion with the source grounded anyway, but it does have a tendency to fuzz out right there, so I guess I'll stick a 1k w/bypass cap in place of the trimmer.

Also:  is it just me or does it sound like there's some crossover distortion happening in there with Q2 grounded in the SRPP configuration?

[reverberation66]

  haha, pad per hole perf construction rules!  point to point baby!

[WGTP]

Did you check the old forum?  I like 470 - 1K at the source.