What's the legal status of the Decimator right now?

[raulduke]

Or we could look into other high quality alternatives....

http://www.thatcorp.com/datashts/dn100.pdf

THAT Audio stuff is the Mutts Nutts. The same 4301 chip is used in this:


Which is a serious piece of audiophile equipment.

The 4301 costs around £5 from Mouser/Farnell etc.

The whole THAT website is a treasure trove of information (which I've only recently discovered).... look at their compressor application notes for example.

[Muadzin]

If it was a good idea...there would be a ready to purchase PCB available....

Josh

Tada!!!!

http://www.3pdt.com/products/d-cimator-noise-gate

So, how does 3pdt.com get away with it then?

[pickdropper]

If it was a good idea...there would be a ready to purchase PCB available....

Josh

Tada!!!!

http://www.3pdt.com/products/d-cimator-noise-gate

So, how does 3pdt.com get away with it then?

They are in Asia.  Overseas patent enforcement is challenging.  ISP Tech could potentially shut down sales in the US, but tracking a Chinese seller sending boards to the US would be difficult if not impossible.

[jimilee]

This makes it o.k. I guess???
Patent & Trademark Owner: If you feel any of our products violate your Trademark, Design or Patent Rights please contact us immediately and we will instantly remove any offending listing pending further discussions.　

[pickdropper]

This makes it o.k. I guess???
Patent & Trademark Owner: If you feel any of our products violate your Trademark, Design or Patent Rights please contact us immediately and we will instantly remove any offending listing pending further discussions.　

Not saying it's OK, just harder to enforce.

[GermanCdn]

3pdt.com has no issue with ripping off people's designs.  He, at one time, had two MB designs directly cloned on his site for sale.  They disappeared pretty quickly, though, so I'm guessing someone suggested to him that he shouldn't sell them.  Surprised ISP hasn't done the same.  Maybe he's just that far under the radar.

I find it interesting that he's selling completely assembled boards for the decimator clone.

[BillyBoy]

Cooder - I found numerous sources of different types of noise.  As my lengthy reply indicates, it is death by 1000 cuts and you have to attack on multiple fronts in multiple ways to make progress that isn't swamped by the things you don't/can't fix.  Even this long response just touches the tip of the iceberg.  Or the tips of several icebergs.

RFI is probably going to be present at some level.  That's the kind I was always focused on.  Shielding works, if it is properly installed and grounded.  You already know about stuff that helps with RFI:  humbuckers or other noiseless pickups (love my Kinmans!), shielded cables, shorter cables, noise reduction gear, shielding guitar cavities, etc.  Anything metallic can act as an antenna and pick up RFI noise.  This is the classic "I hear an AM radio station through my pedal" problem.  The strategy is almost always to put a metallic shield around whatever you don't want to pick up the noise, and drain the noise out of the shield to ground, or somehow cancel it out like a humbucker.  But that doesn't always work, or rather it isn't always practical to do it properly.  For example, you might have your pedal enclosed in a nice aluminum box to shield it.  But the noise could be generated by something inside the pedal itself, like the clock or LFO in that delay circuit.  Amps can have a similar problem, too.  The problem with analog, is that once the noise is in there, getting it out can impact other components of the signal, too.  So it is better to avoid than correct it.  I had already done a bunch of this type of shielding, and it didn't seem to be helping.  It actually was helping, but only with the RFI.  The main type of noise I had wasn't RFI, so that other noise masked the progress I was making in getting rid of RFI noise.

EMI/EMF is caused when a conductor is placed in a magnetic field.  The magnetic field and changes in it will generate a current in the conductor.  A current going through a conductor will generate a magnetic field, too.  Things start interacting with each other and generating more noise.  This is where it gets a little tricky and you have to fiddle around a bit.  Having your gear in the magnetic fields generated by something can cause problems.  For example, I had some gear near an outside wall of my house.  My pool pump is on the other side of that wall.  The motor for the pool pump generates a strong EMF field that easily goes through the wall – when it is running.  It is nearly impossible to block magnetism in an affordable way.  It takes very careful application of magnetic shielding, which is made out of expensive exotic metal alloys.  The good news is that magnetic fields usually affect a very small area and just moving something a few inches can get you out of them, or orienting something differently will minimize the noise generated.  By moving stuff about a foot or two, I was able to get out of the noise generated by the pool motor.  A good meter is really helpful for finding these problems.  Pretty much anything electrical could be a potential source of problems.  I also found most wall warts generate a lot of this type of noise.  Of course I had wall warts on my pedalboard for those odd voltage pedals.  Instead of plugging them into my pedal board's outlets, I moved them a couple of feet to a surge protector plugged into the wall.  Transformers in amps generate noise.  I had some FX sitting on my amps, so I moved them.  Many other things cause problems, but in such a short distance that they aren't likely to be an issue:  plug ins, light switches, dimmer switches, fans, lights, appliances, amps, power conditioners (transformers), etc, etc, etc.  Signal cables running near power cables isn't good.  Rerunning that rats nest of cables helped.  Keep your gear away from anything electric.  Maybe someday we can have analog-optical and avoid all this :^)  You can't affordably shield from magnet fields – but it is mostly relatively easy to avoid.

The biggest noise problems I had were related to dirty power.  The wiring in your house will pick up RFI and EMI and turn it into noise in your power at a wide range of frequencies and harmonics.  Many of the things that have magnetic fields are close to the wiring (because they have to be plugged in, are near walls where your wiring is, etc.), causing the wiring to pick up that noise.  It also turns out that many types of electrical appliances generate very large amounts of noise back into the wiring directly.  Dimmer switches and fluorescent lighting do this (in addition to generating magnetic fields that probably aren't a problem).  Ceiling fans and other electric fans do it.  Nearly all appliances do it.  The biggest offenders for me are my computers, particularly the UPS units I use.  I think anything with brushes/contacts or switching power supplies will be big problems.  Digital stuff seems to have a good probability of generating power noise.  If you have something messing up your power, it will most strongly affect that circuit in your house that it is plugged into, but will travel through all the wiring in your house to some extent.  Some options include: use a different circuit in your house or move noisy stuff to a different circuit, eliminate those noise sources, or get power conditioners that will filter it out.  For me, this is where I had the biggest improvement, and still have more to come.  The UPS units I have are really bad.  I haven't replaced them yet, but I will.  The kind of UPS technology that doesn't generate noise is a bit pricey.  I think all the normal consumer UPS units will cause major noise issues in your power.  I was already using Monster power filters, some pretty expensive ones with lots of "stages" in Monster-speak.  Turns out those are almost useless at removing my power noise.  I measured them and was very disappointed.  I found a $125 Furman that does much better.  These units will filter the power in your house, not just what you plug into them.  When you plug them in, they help all the outlets on that circuit to some degree, not just the outlets on the power conditioner.  But they don't remove it all.  They got about one quarter to a third for me, depending on what I had plugged in generating noise.  My meter shows me how much.  Furman has some better ones, and I will probably upgrade to those at some point, as dirty power still accounts for most of my remaining noise problem.  Also, I found that some things (like my UPS) generate noise even when they are turned off.  You have to unplug them.  Note that any power cable plugged into an outlet, even when the device is turned off, still acts as a great RFI/EMI receiver and dumps noise into your wiring.  Wall warts also generate dirty power – unplug them if you aren't using them.  (Besides, if you use power adapters to power your pedals, there is a good chance that they are on and running all the time even when you aren't using them, so unplug 'em...)

Before I used the meters, I figured that dirty power would NOT be my problem.  I had those Monsters, and everything was plugged into them.  Lots of gear – especially those pedals we build – usually have power noise filtering caps in them.  It turned out that I was two, bordering on three, and occasionally four, orders of magnitude higher in noise than seems to be considered "acceptable" by some sketchy criteria.  I had one electric fan that alone generated so much EMI that it went off the scale of my meter.  So some of those things were working (filtering), but simply weren't effective when that much noise was present. 

Before all of this, I used one of those $10 circuit analyzers to make sure my wiring was actually done correctly.  Luckily, that was all OK.  If it wasn't, that would be the first thing to attack.  But if you read the fine print, those may not work if you have two problems in the same circuit.  I got really lucky on a second thing that was really worrying me.  I have some really big power lines just behind my house – the kind with a greenbelt below them, huge steel towers, and several big power lines.  Those things sizzle and crackle on wet days.  I was afraid the EMF from there was going to be the problem, with no solution for that.  It was not.  They caused almost no noise at all.  I could only get a reading by standing directly under the lines and raising my meter as high as I could reach.  Even then, the increase was orders of magnitude less than the problems caused by stuff inside my house.

There's another thing I would like to try.  There are a couple of companies that make power filters designed either for a circuit in your house, or a phase into your breaker box.  Basically they are just large capacitors that filter out noise and dump it to ground.  Some are much too small and require "as many as it takes", which for my house could be around 20 – 30.  Others, you need only one for each "side" of your breaker box (usually two total), just plugged in somewhere in circuits on both sides.  The cost of these would be around $1000 - $1500 for my situation.  They have roughly "tube amp sized" caps in them, connectors, a housing, and maybe a couple of other components.  I imagine that you could make the pair of them for under $100 and try it out.  BTW, breaker boxes (actually your electric meter which is usually close by) are huge noise sources, so if you play near one you might want to move to a different spot.

I didn't worry about wireless stuff.  It does generate some noise, but I can shield against that.  I live in a neighborhood where I can see a dozen or more wireless networks, with lots of garage door openers, baby monitors, those fancy electric smart meters that are now being installed, and all sorts of stuff.  There is also a very busy regional airport nearby (radars, radios, etc), cell towers, etc.  Other than continuing to be careful with shielding, there's not much I could do about that.  It doesn't seem to be a big portion of my problem now, though.  I used to use a pretty good Shure wireless unit for my guitar.  That helped reduce cables/noise, but you also lose that direct connection to your gear.  I don't use the wireless now.

There are apparently health benefits to reducing the EMI/EMF around you, but I completely disregarded that because the info was too sketchy.  Apparently there is considerable energy savings (10-20%) available by cleaning power problems, as well as improved life for appliances – more stuff I didn't really worry about.  I just wanted less noise in my gear.  In the end, rerunning cables, moving stuff out of magnetic fields, using a different circuit in my house, avoiding wall warts, and using power conditioners that filter the frequencies that I have in my power all helped quite a bit and cost very little.  I can also turn off/unplug some unnecessary lights, fans, etc when I play.  I plan to swap out my remaining Monster units for Furman units that work better for my specific situation.  I shut down a computer I wasn't using very much.  I need to get rid of those super-noisy UPS units.  I would like to try the "big capacitor" power filters and see if they work as claimed/demoed online.  I think they would, based on what I saw with the Furman unit.  And I'm still careful with RFI shielding.  I hope to have those Decimators on ebay someday – and that will be a NGD or NAD :^)

Anyways, the meters allowed me to find and quantify the contributions of all these different problems, as well as see the impact of various solutions.  Until that, I was guessing incorrectly much of the time.  When you have the hard data, it all makes sense and you can solve the problem(s).  Duh!  Just like any combination of equipment, there are multiple meters that will work, but you need to get the right features and use them properly and you need to choose meters that complement each other to cover your problem space.

[Betty Wont]

If it was a good idea...there would be a ready to purchase PCB available....

Josh

Tada!!!!

http://www.3pdt.com/products/d-cimator-noise-gate

Ooh, anyone build that funny cat yet?

[cooder]

Thanks for the very indepth answer BillyBoy, thanks for taking the time to write it all up.
You obviously have researched and done a lot regarding this.

[Haberdasher]

3pdt.com has no issue with ripping off people's designs.  He, at one time, had two MB designs directly cloned on his site for sale.  They disappeared pretty quickly, though, so I'm guessing someone suggested to him that he shouldn't sell them.  Surprised ISP hasn't done the same.  Maybe he's just that far under the radar.

I find it interesting that he's selling completely assembled boards for the decimator clone.

i remember the thing with them selling madbean pcb's.  they looked exactly the same down to the shape of the pcb.

something is definitely fishy with them.  I know a guy who bought a couple of klone pcb's there and when he emailed them for support, they apologized & said they were unable to send him a schematic.

[GermanCdn]

3pdt.com has no issue with ripping off people's designs.  He, at one time, had two MB designs directly cloned on his site for sale.  They disappeared pretty quickly, though, so I'm guessing someone suggested to him that he shouldn't sell them.  Surprised ISP hasn't done the same.  Maybe he's just that far under the radar.

I find it interesting that he's selling completely assembled boards for the decimator clone.

i remember the thing with them selling madbean pcb's.  they looked exactly the same down to the shape of the pcb.

something is definitely fishy with them.  I know a guy who bought a couple of klone pcb's there and when he emailed them for support, they apologized & said they were unable to send him a schematic.

I've got, err, four of their boards, a Ross Comp, a Scrambler, a Small Stone, and a Small Clone (back when they were selling two for one boards for $5 each).  Documentation is rubbish, missing part numbers, wrong values, no schematics, etc.  Boards were not particularly well designed, took up an entire 125B with loads of empty real estate on the board.  End of the day, the effects worked fine, but not without a big chunk of DIY savvy on my end.

[jtn191]

I met Buck, owner of ISP once...seems like a nice guy and the company is pretty small. Their speakers are the main products, kind of bright sounding but powerful for their size.

[gtr2]

3PDT . com  is a joke of a pcb shop IMO...

Josh

[billstein]

Webroot flagged 3DPT.com as a malicious website. Anybody else have this problem?

[blearyeyes]

My first apartment studio had a ground problem. I ran a wire from ground to the cold water pipe on my water heater.   Silence.

Isolation with giant toroid transformers is used in electrical panels for studios.
Placing a rod into the ground is also a part of the solution.

So getting clean power is difficult but possible with some of the more expensive power conditioners that have voltage control and isolation through transformers. Expensive but that is the issue AFAIK..