participate in the wah pot listening test if you would please.

[Electron Tornado]

Joe, what's the n30 inductor?

Next you can do a shootout with different inductors.

[joegagan]

n30 is a type of magnet. there was internet speculation that the budda wah guy asked dunlop to do them for the dunlop made buddas around that time.
i have seen the n30 designation on non-budda dunlops from that era. i also wonder if the ones not marked n30 may also have the n30 magnet material, since the rest of the inductor looks the same. even the ones that don't say n30 sound good.

i've done a lot of inductor testing, bottom line is mh doesn't matter much, R is more important. spice modeling bears this out as well. you can tune around mh differences, not so much if the R is off.

[deadastronaut]

hmmm not sure...

hard to tell until its under my foot with a good distortion + humbuckers to feel it respond to ripping out 'chewy' licks..

[Electron Tornado]

n30 is a type of magnet. there was internet speculation that the budda wah guy asked dunlop to do them for the dunlop made buddas around that time.
i have seen the n30 designation on non-budda dunlops from that era. i also wonder if the ones not marked n30 may also have the n30 magnet material, since the rest of the inductor looks the same. even the ones that don't say n30 sound good.

Considering guitar pickups as well, I have a feeling it may be a case of 1mH is 1mH, but what you use to get that 1mH will have an effect on circuit response.

i've done a lot of inductor testing, bottom line is mh doesn't matter much, R is more important. spice modeling bears this out as well. you can tune around mh differences, not so much if the R is off.

Can't you adjust the resistance by changing the values of the resistors connected to the inductor. That seems to be what I get from reading R.G.'s "Technology of Wah Pedals".

[Flooflox]

2

[Dingus]

 1 & 4, probably liked 1 best.

[joegagan]

ok, here is the lineup -  thanks for all the input, veyr interesting responses all around.

1. PEC log taper rv4 style w/ a custom made smaller gear. with the standard dunlop gear, the rack throw does not get full resistance in a crybaby shell. 97k, carbon.

2. stock pot for this wah, a mid 90s clarostat hopotz1. 115k. has the standard crybaby rapid kink. carbon const.

3. hotpotz2, 96k, plastic element. same taper as # 2. several guys noticed the taper was the same on 2 and 3, good ears, guys.

4. custom made BI , was supposed to be 100k , reads 90k. was rev taper- some people also spotted that. had custom small gear, same travel problem as pot #1. plastic element.

5. hotpotz2 plastic( vox spec but internally same as hotpotz2), this time with custom larger gear to attempt to smooth out the kink. it worked. some guys noted it had smoothness similar to # 1.

overall, the comments proved that all of you really paid attention. many of you noted the same things i did when playing each clip live and listening back to the vids.

pot # 1 comes very close to the icar in that is does not have the kink that crybaby pots do. pot#4 had a smiliar effect whilst reversed, the smoothness still showed up.
pot#5 was also noted by some people as smooth, which was the intended effect of the larger gear.

many people commented on the rapid flip of 2 and 3, the 'kink' as i call it. my experience with customers and others is that people either love or hate the kink. upside, you get the quack, or crack. it feels lively. downside, it is much harder to get the finer control of the midsweep harmonics , and possibly some tones aren't even there.

others prefer the long sweep of an icar style. upside is the smooth sweep and finer control. possible better harmonics in the mids due to the loading/unloading of the cap and inductor. downside is less quack, less lively feel. in the case of many icar types, the R range exceeds the physical travel of the treadle, forcing the user or tech to set the emphasis to bass or treble only , to the detriment of the opposite.  the hotpotz and earlier crybaby tapers avoid this problem as 90+% of their R range is in approx 35-40 % of the rotation of the pot

[Keppy]

Thanks for all the detailed info!

[joegagan]

put the test pot # 5 setup  on ebay as a regular available item. i also sell the nice PEC pot from test 1 as a regular item. better deal$ for forum members, give me a shout.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=121093381694

[zombiwoof]

Joe-
I have a wah question for you.  The early vox/crybaby wahs used polystyrene caps for the .01uf caps.  Later, it seems they changed to regular poly film caps.  Do you think the polystyrene caps make any difference in the sound of a wah?.  Have you ever compared polystyrene to poly film caps for those two .01uf's?.
I did change the .01uf's out to polystyrene in a Vox V847 I modded to Clyde specs, but I did a bunch of other changes at the same time (true bypass, a couple of resistor value changes, and different lower-gain transistors), so I can't really say if the polystryrene caps make a difference, I used them just because the older Voxes had them.
Thanks.

[joegagan]

alan, believe it or not, i have not made any comparisons between types of caps. just for the fun of it, i sometimes change out the little box caps in modern dunlops for older film, but i can't say i hear a difference since i make other changes at the same time. not very scientific

my friend george blekas of pedalworx says the old thomas silver foil caps  sound really good.

teese used to build special versions of his wahs for certain dealers with tropical fish ( 90s ), not sure what the reasoning was.

so much is going on with the sound of a wah i think it is really hard to isolate things with such minute differences as cap type.

[Jazznoise]

Listen to the noise from each one heel down at the start of each clip, that'll tell you where the cutoff is roughly at. With the noise floor so high I'm also wondering how that'll colour my perception of the wah sounds, but that aside:

For dark I liked 1 and 4, probably a good one for rock. For funk or alot of clean tone play, I liked the "cut" of 2 and 5 - but 2 moreso.  If I could own one of these wah sounds, I'd want numero deux!   

Can't say 3 was my thing. Didn't get in.

[joegagan]

i've had other complaints about the noise floor. one guy emailed me and told me he couldn't stand to listen to them and refused

thanks for the comparo comments, appreciated.

[Jazznoise]

Unfair to say unlistenable, but if you've ever loved a really thick, heavy sounding album only to find it sounds like a mess in a car you know what I mean! The shape of a noise floor can really colour the sound sitting above it.

[zombiwoof]

alan, believe it or not, i have not made any comparisons between types of caps. just for the fun of it, i sometimes change out the little box caps in modern dunlops for older film, but i can't say i hear a difference since i make other changes at the same time. not very scientific

my friend george blekas of pedalworx says the old thomas silver foil caps  sound really good.

teese used to build special versions of his wahs for certain dealers with tropical fish ( 90s ), not sure what the reasoning was.

so much is going on with the sound of a wah i think it is really hard to isolate things with such minute differences as cap type.

As far as Tropical Fish caps, they were just metallized polyester caps, my feeling is that there are modern equivalents that are essentially the same type, and people just use them because they were used in some of the old pedals, and I don't think they will impart any "mojo" except cosmetic.  But I find it interesting that they used polystyrene caps in those old voxes only for the .01uf caps, for the .22uf caps they used poly (some of them had the trop fish for the .22's).  I just wonder why they chose to use polystyrene only for those two caps, and not the same type for all the caps in the pedal.  I would think there had to be a reason of some kind for using them, whether it was for sound reasons, or maybe they just got a good deal on a bunch of .01uf polystyrenes!.  I don't think it wasn't for penny-pinching considerations, as polystyrene has always been a more expensive cap than other common types.  My guess is that they might have been quieter in that part of the wah circuit than the poly's they used for the .22uf's, or something like that.

Anyway, I have been wanting to ask about that for some time, as I have never heard any mention of the polystyrene .01's in the old Voxes in discussions of wah mods on forums, although it is talked about on Fuzz Central's Clyde McCoy wah pages, he lists their use as part of building a Clyde McCoy clone or modding a modern wah to Clyde specs.  There are still currently manufactured Asian-made polystyrene caps available at Mouser, I found some nice European NOS .01uf ones from an electronic surplus store online for a good price and bought some, so they still can be had if anyone wants to experiment with using them in a wah mod.

Thanks for the wah pot shoot-out, it was very interesting.  I read a long time ago that the mil-spec metal-case wah pots like the HotPotz I were a special taper ("S" taper or something like that), but many people are now saying they and the HotPotz II are just linear taper pots.

Al

[joegagan]

Good run-down on caps, alan.
The hotpotz 1 and 2 follow the same taper recipe as 70s crybaby. About as far from linear as you can get. I don't know what S taper is, but hotpotz taper seems like condensed log, with the r range occurring in a small percentage of the rotation.

[Kipper4]

I liked 4 best for my taste.
Now i'll go back and read the rest of the replys and see what everyone else thinks.

[joegagan]

interesting, #4 is a rev log which was a mistake. puts the emphasis on the low mid.