Acapulco gold clone

[beneharris]

Well I've spent a lot of time with this circuit now, and ive decided I just don't like it very much. I can't tame the noise like I want. It sounds cool at lower gain, but squeals at higher. It seems it either wants to be too gated, or squeal. Oh well. This was more of an exercise in playing with a circuit and designing and building my own board for it. I had the boards made at elecrow, and they are nice boards.







His cigarette gets brighter with another of the sound 2 light boards I got. The envirotex pour didn't come out well because the decal lifted underneath and made it wavey. Oh well, I'm gonna try my hand at etching. Decals are just too finnicky for me.

[alanp]

It sounds cool at lower gain, but squeals at higher.

This sounds like a layout or wiring issue to me.

[m-Kresol]

cool stuff. I liked the graphics the first time around you posted it.

You might want to try not to include right angled traces in your layouts. for some reason smoother corners and 45° turns are preffered.

Also, more importantly, I would rewire the cigarette LED or insulate the wires. they are horribly close to the output jack tip and might short out.

[beneharris]

It sounds cool at lower gain, but squeals at higher.

This sounds like a layout or wiring issue to me.

See I thought that too. I've also done this on two different Vero layouts and have had the same problems.

I've noticed eqds layout has been hugely spread apart, so maybe that says something.

[beneharris]

cool stuff. I liked the graphics the first time around you posted it.

You might want to try not to include right angled traces in your layouts. for some reason smoother corners and 45° turns are preffered.

Also, more importantly, I would rewire the cigarette LED or insulate the wires. they are horribly close to the output jack tip and might short out.

I couldn't remember if I had posted that post forum crash or not.

I did heed your advice on right angles in the newer version of this board, but I had done this before you suggested that to me in my Octavia thread, which I also redesigned.

I've noticed there isn't anybody selling boards for this circuit and ive seen a number of them coming up with designs. I think. I'm not the only one running into problems.

The led I have to move anyway. There is so much gain in this circuit that it's just always on. I didn't want to isolate it until I finalized that.

Thanks for the tips guys. It's back to the drawing board, I'm determined to make this work. Grounding pin 7 seems to help with squealing but you lose a lot of gain. I'm gonna do some more testing.

[madbean]

Possible mods - try 10k for the volume knob. Also, increase the 68k resistor at the input to the second 386 to something like 220k or 330k.

[beneharris]

Possible mods - try 10k for the volume knob. Also, increase the 68k resistor at the input to the second 386 to something like 220k or 330k.

Thanks for the tip, I've not tried a bigger volume pot, but I have played around with those resistor values, though off the top of my head I don't know whether I went that high or not. I'll give that a shot tonight.