Tube Cricket Troubleshooting

[glenn.b]

Hello all!  First off, thanks in advance for any hints, suggestions, and good old fashioned common sense ideas from you all!   I just got done  building a OLC. Tube Cricket, and I am ready to plug in, but I have no output sound.  I am not totally at a loss here at all, though;  the LED light comes on, the tube warms up to a nice pink glow, and I have managed to set the bias properly-VB1 reads 9.06, and VB2 is at 9.05,  the goal here is 9V  I gotta think those values are close enough...I just cannot figure what causing a complete lack of sound, when everything else came up so well.  I have rechecked my cap & resistor values, as well as re-heated the solder pads.  Sure could use some ideas, and once again, thanks.

[anchovie]

Please read the "Debugging" stick thread.

[glenn.b]

Thank  you Anchovie.  I did read it, and as I was going though the phone jacks with multmeter, found the trouble.  The jacks that came with it are plastic enclosed, and have 6 possible termination points, as opposed to the 2 or 3 that I am used to.  Though I followed the layout to the letter, it did not occur to me that I was hooking up to tips and sleeves on both jacks that were not involved.  Now the little guy goes, but with a good bit of  hum, or kind of a "white noise" type of hush....How to fix that, I wonder?  I gotta note though, this is not some unbearable
sound, just not as clean as one would think it outta be.  Also, the volume, tone, and gain seem very ineffective .  The last two,although wired  in accordance with layout, seem to work backward, while the volume never allows the sound to dwindle to nothing....Any Ideas, anyone?   Once again, thanks right up front!

[glenn.b]

 
     Hello again!  I finally got this Tube Cricket running smoothly, so I wanted to make sure to close out this post.  First off, as it was, the circuit was not grounded to the enclosure-this is because the input / output jacks are plastic.  I put a wire between the input sleeve to one of the 4 screws that that hold the handles on.  Used a terminal lug here, backed off the screw,..waalaa....grounded!   This reduced the "white noise"/ hum a great deal, and also brought control to the volume, gain and tone pots ( the gain and tone are still backwards, though).  The other thing I did that I think has helped is I used shielded wire from input tip-pcb, and from pcb-output tip.  In both of these, I grounded the shield to a spare GND port in the PCB, I'm sure there are other(better?) ways of doing this, but admittedly , I am still rather new to this and have not seen it all.  I do know that the 60 HZ noise is greatly reduced , to the point where I would be glad to make a movie/ soundclip and put it on youtube.  Actually I don't know that there is a clip on the Tube Cricket....

[Scruffie]

     Hello again!  I finally got this Tube Cricket running smoothly, so I wanted to make sure to close out this post.  First off, as it was, the circuit was not grounded to the enclosure-this is because the input / output jacks are plastic.  I put a wire between the input sleeve to one of the 4 screws that that hold the handles on.  Used a terminal lug here, backed off the screw,..waalaa....grounded!   This reduced the "white noise"/ hum a great deal, and also brought control to the volume, gain and tone pots ( the gain and tone are still backwards, though).  The other thing I did that I think has helped is I used shielded wire from input tip-pcb, and from pcb-output tip.  In both of these, I grounded the shield to a spare GND port in the PCB, I'm sure there are other(better?) ways of doing this, but admittedly , I am still rather new to this and have not seen it all.  I do know that the 60 HZ noise is greatly reduced , to the point where I would be glad to make a movie/ soundclip and put it on youtube.  Actually I don't know that there is a clip on the Tube Cricket....

Awesome  Great you finally got it working, always a good feeling.

There is no soundclips of the Tube Cricket available, it would be great if you could take the time to make some, I and i'm sure many others have wondered how it sounds.

[glenn.b]

 Give me a few days and I'll shoot a rough film clip off my Iphone cam, then I'll even get out the MIC and Garageband and do a song with overdubs ( Hard to interact w/ music minded folks in my neck of the woods)