EF440 noise/distortion

[BAARON]

I just finished perfboarding an EF440 clone and boxed it up, and it sounds splendid.  I am in love with the way it sounds.  It works very well, except for one little detail: as you turn the range knob up higher, a distorted, buzzy version of your signal creeps into the background.  By the time the range knob is turned all the way up, the noise when you play is almost as loud as the incoming signal.  It hides nicely when I'm playing through the dirty channel on my amp, but it's very obvious on the clean channel.

Is this normal for the EF440, or is there a chance I did something wrong?  Something that would cause this background distortion, yet still allow the rest of the pedal to function properly?

[Freekmagnet]

I'm not an expert, but from what I understand that fizzy sound you get when you turn the range knob up is normal. I built the BYOC version a while back and it fizzes also. They posted something on their forum about it and how it was normal for it to respond that way.

It's a good filter by the way. I like mine. It really only gets one sound, but that one sound is pretty gosh darn good.

[BAARON]

Okay then, as long as it's not something wrong with the circuit!

I actually added a few mods to mine to make it a bit more flexible.  I added the Q control, which basically just acts as an intensity knob, and the attack speed switch.  They add a bit more versatility without straying far from the basic sound.  I tried a few of the EHX filters before I built this for myself, and I like this one because it's more straightforward to get a good sound than something like the QTron, which simply has too many options and things to fiddle around with.  The feel is a little more snappy and the transition from "not moving the filter" to "moving the filter all the way to the top" is more abrupt with the EF440 than with the QTron, but that's fine with me.

Maybe I'll post my perfboard layout for it later, now that I've verified it.

[fuzzo]

I had the same issue with mine. I never find something to fix that

[FuzzAldrin]

nature of the beast?
GGG's 440 does the same thing.