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Orange TubeSync DIVO OV4 -Biasing Kit-

#21
devin_bass said:
View attachment 486254View attachment 486255
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Holy Moly, with a rig like that you can't be too dumb a 19 year old! That is a completely fantastic rig you own there. That must be satisfying. I would think it would be cool for you to get the pedal that allows you to switch to half power. It seems that way you could use one cab at half power and get the same tone and feel out of your rig as when you are at full power with both cabs. Of course, maybe you never have the need to use only one cab. :bassist:

Thanks for your info here. If I do order one of these units I may take you up on more installation tips, since I would rather not have to pay a tech if I don't really need to.
 
#22
Actually I'm 21 now and was 19 at the time I installed it. I worked many hours at my minimum wage job after highschool ended for the day to get that rig! And I actually do have the pedal, but I find it only useful for recording and getting a sweet tone without getting super loud. One cab is actually enough to overpower a band if you like a dirty tube tone. The second one is just so I won't be so dirty
 
#24
Boot Soul said:
Thanks for the clear explanation, megafiddle.
Click to expand...


Glad it helped.

Tubes are sort of like the "classical mechanics" of the audio world.

devin_bass said:
The half power mode works with the ad200 as well...
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Do you know how they actually get half power mode? Is it by just switching out two tubes?

I get 1/4 power (calculated) when two tubes are pulled. You need to restore the impedance
match to get half, I believe.

-
 
#25
I honestly have zero idea how it works, but I know in my instruction manual it says whenever half power mode is engaged, I must make sure the load is correct. For me, that means I connect my 8 ohm cab into the 4 ohm slot of my amp.Maybe I will email Orange and see if they can explain it to me.
 
#28
Well, seeing that half-power use necessitates connecting a cab to the OT tap output that is one-half of the cab's impedance, I have a bit of a problem. The only taps on my Simms-Watts are 7.5 Ohm and 15 Ohm, and my cab is 8 Ohm. To use this amp at half power, I would need to use a 16 Ohm cab connected to the 7.5 Ohm output. I suppose I could rewire a 4 Ohm cab to be 16 Ohms, and go with that. But that's a lot of uphill from what works well now. The half power idea might not work so well with bass amplification anyway, if after hitting your footswitch and going from full power with matched impedance to half, with a mismatch condition where you are not supposed to crank up the volume too much.

OV4 manual says :

It is advised however that if the amp is going to be used regularly or 'driven 'hard' in 'two valve'
mode the speaker should be correctly matched to the amplifier. The easiest way to achieve this is for
example: if you are using an 8 ohm speaker change to 4 ohms or if you are using a 16 ohm speaker
change to 8 ohms. ​
 
#29
If you actually need some real tube overdrive at a lower power level,
rewiring the cab to 16 ohm is your only choice.

It is something you can't do with a pedal though, unless you also add
a circuit to change output taps.

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#30
I got to say that this is the first I've heard of it, and while it looks like a somewhat novel idea for guitar, for bass it looks to me like a solution waiting for a problem. What am I missing here?
 
#32
JimmyM said:
I got to say that this is the first I've heard of it, and while it looks like a somewhat novel idea for guitar, for bass it looks to me like a solution waiting for a problem. What am I missing here?
Click to expand...

More for the plug an play valve changes than the half powerness. Valves should last longer with constantly corrected bias too, from new they tend to drift a bunch, saves having to recheck the bias after a bunch of use.
 
#34
DIVO has been available for a few years now. In the future, it looks like something that will gain in popularity. I looks good on paper but I don't think that it's ready for prime time just yet.

As I recall, the bias has to be set up by a tech when the unit is installed. The user has some options but it is not open enough. I would like to see all parameters controllable by the user, either through a USB or WI-FI connection. The Wi-fi would be nice because then a phone app could be used. But is really is an interesting toy for a techy at this point. A lot of amps don't need anything this elaborate. In fact, reports of auto-bias issues are turning people off.
 

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