Hartman NKT275 Fuzz

[Jose Aparicio]

Hi,

I've been to www.hartmanelectronicstore.com and I felt really tempted to buy one of those fuzz with NOS NKT275. Has anybody heard anything about this man?

Thanks.

[rockgardenlove]

Seems like they'd be using the worse and worse transistors as they run out.  IMO you can get better tones for less money with less famous transistors.

[Jose Aparicio]

Not too many replies and no one talks about him in the forum. He claims to use NOS NKT275 like Analogman

[bigbud]

you have to be carefull with nkt275 as the newer ones have the peg on the emitter and/or a rim around the bottom the originals didn't they were just a smooth cylinder and the 3 pegs no lumps or bumps.

I have two which I got from the dunlop fuzz face I was suprised they used NOS, although I use AC128 in my arbiter fuzz face.

I have heard small bear does some great germaniums, I live in the uk so I get mine from a local(I say local it's miles away from me) electronic store they specially order them in for me, although when I build a new arbiter fuzz I'm going to get my transistors from Stuart.

NOS NKT275 are good
AC128 are good
no named ones or ones you have never heard of are good

rule of thumb as long as the you match the right hfe for a fuzz it will sound good.

I have two arbiters, 1 original and one clone the original sounds a bit better due to the old components mostly the capacitors it might not be the reason but hey it might be.

My original had AC128's in the some sites say the orig ones didn't as they have never seen them maybe it's like the wah and some had different parts I don't know my orig was passed down to me or maybe my family were electronic geniuses and changed don't know but I tried changing them to NKT275 and it sounded exactly the same(although I did change them back for nostalgic reason I say nostalgic im only 21)

if you match them they should sound good that has been my experience.

My advice is build your own it's cheaper and no different my dunlop fuzz that I bought (before I got passed down the real deal arbiter) was cost £89 in a sale and it was rubbish so I copied a board layout from fuzz generalguitargadgets and built it etching the board myself got all the right components and it only cost me £20 most of it was the etching fluid and pcb pen(don't use a pcb pen on things like uni-vibe unless your an artist, thing has a million tracks)

the real arbiter has different components than named online maybe value codes were different then dunno?

[mac]

rule of thumb as long as the you match the right hfe for a fuzz it will sound good.

q1: hfe=70-90, leakage<50ua better but can be up to 200ua
q2: hfe=90-120, leakage<200ua but 300-400 may work.

q1 should be low leakage so as to have 4.5v at q2 collector with a resistor closer to the original 8.2k.
Also q1 has a much great effect on the bias resistors than q2. Just finger heat the transistors one at a time and watch what happens at q2 collector. Or if you bias the circuit with 4.5v at q2 collector, and you replace q2 with a leaky transistor ot much higher gain, vc2 will move a little. Put the original q2 and replace q1; vc2 will jump a lot.

About the sound, I have some american and japanese transistors with the right parameters, ie, the ones above. I know some may say I'm crazy but there are differences. Some are brighter, some darker, some have more mids, etc. But they all have fuzz nicely.

mac

[bigbud]

Sorry forgot to mention what the right hfe was oh well, mac done a better job explaining than I could 

[vanessa]

Not too many replies and no one talks about him in the forum. He claims to use NOS NKT275 like Analogman

Why would anyone talk about this company on this forum? This is a DIY forum, not H.C.. Even with Mike's company (Analogman), not many  topics are brought up about his work because it's mostly clones (well made I might add).