Source Audio Sorcerers Society (S.A.S.S) Part 3

[NoxNoctus]

Could someone tell me how to change the Dimension Reverb from true bypass to buffered bypass? I want to have the reverb trail out when I stop it and I don't have an expression pedal as discussed in the manual. Thanks in advance.

AFAIK you can only achieve this using an Expression Pedal and the Reverb Send mode. I wish you could just let it trail off when using the buffered bypass mode

 

[scotch]

AFAIK you can only achieve this using an Expression Pedal and the Reverb Send mode. I wish you could just let it trail off when using the buffered bypass mode

+1

 

[smperry]

AFAIK you can only achieve this using an Expression Pedal and the Reverb Send mode. I wish you could just let it trail off when using the buffered bypass mode

Thanks for the quick reply. Bummer...

 

[rsmith601]

There is a "soft" bypass mode on this pedal. I do not think it is in the manual. I am getting ready to go on vacation. Will try to get this answer back to you.

 

[ncabral]

Hello

To hear the reverb tail after you switch off the effect you should change the bypass mode.

For this option:
1 - Unplug your from the 9V DC
2 - Press both foot switches simultaneously
3 - Plug your power back on (Preset lights should blink)

Now when you bypass the reverb, you should still hear the reverb tail.
hope this helps!

Nuno
Sourceaudio

 

[NoxNoctus]

!!! My week has been made. I couldn't find any mention of this whatsoever. It's a pretty nice feature to have, perhaps an addendum to your manual and feature specs would be good, I know there's got to be people looking for it outside of this forum

 

[smperry]

There is a "soft" bypass mode on this pedal. I do not think it is in the manual. I am getting ready to go on vacation. Will try to get this answer back to you.

Hello

To hear the reverb tail after you switch off the effect you should change the bypass mode.

For this option:
1 - Unplug your from the 9V DC
2 - Press both foot switches simultaneously
3 - Plug your power back on (Preset lights should blink)

Now when you bypass the reverb, you should still hear the reverb tail.
hope this helps!

Nuno
Sourceaudio

Awesome!!! Great news, which I think makes this pedal a keeper. Thanks so much.

 

[Adamixoye]

Hey SA guys---

From yesterday, any follow-up on why a DEP won't go to zero in full heel-down position unless I apply extra pressure? All of my (many!) other questions about the DEP can wait, but I really need to understand if I have a faulty unit or not.

 

[scotch]

Hello

To hear the reverb tail after you switch off the effect you should change the bypass mode.

For this option:
1 - Unplug your from the 9V DC
2 - Press both foot switches simultaneously
3 - Plug your power back on (Preset lights should blink)

Now when you bypass the reverb, you should still hear the reverb tail.
hope this helps!

Nuno
Sourceaudio

Awesome. Just tested this and it works! Didn't see that in the manual, thanks!

 

[smperry]

Yep, it's working.

 

[adamaarts]

I was hanging a piece of wall art I made and needed some rubber tabs to cushion against the wall. Remembered I had some rubber feet from the Manta still in the box, so it came in handy.

 

[DinnerWithAGypsy]

Hello

To hear the reverb tail after you switch off the effect you should change the bypass mode.

For this option:
1 - Unplug your from the 9V DC
2 - Press both foot switches simultaneously
3 - Plug your power back on (Preset lights should blink)

Now when you bypass the reverb, you should still hear the reverb tail.
hope this helps!

Nuno
Sourceaudio

This is a game-changer for me. Awesome!

Just so the powers-that-be are aware, there is no mention of this in the SB2 Dimension Reverb manual (to my knowledge). It is information of critical importance.

 

[TheSleeve]

---When using Output 1 with my BSY600, it didn't seem to have quite the same range as my Yamaha FC-7. I thought these were both 50 kOhm pots. More oddly, the lack of range is in the heel position, not the toe position. It's not that significant in terms of what I was to do with the BSY600, but it was noticeable in extensive A/B-ing of the two.
---When using Output 2 with my Eventide Modfactor, there were some problems. This was a little more expected because the Eventide expects 25 kOhm TS and the DEP puts out 50 kOhm TRS. I thought with the knob I could dial it back, but it doesn't work how I would expect. I can get the dial on the DEP pretty close so that the action is from 0 to 100 (the Eventide shows this digitally), though it's not perfect. In addition to not being perfect (but probably close enough for most of what I'll do), the bigger issue is that my Eventide interprets it backwards. 0 is toe down, 100 is heel down. For parameter adjustments, this is okay I think; I'm pretty sure I can just program the Eventide "backwards"---i.e., it doesn't matter what values I program in for toe and heel position. But it's a little weird for real-time modulation control. (NOTE: Through all of this, I was using a TS cable. A TRS cable was unresponsive.)
(*snip*)

QUESTIONS:
---What is the allen wrench in the box for? The manual says nothing about it and I don't see any places that use it.
---The manual says Output 1 and the Sensor output cannot be used simultaneously, but I tried it and it seems to work. I'm not sure what is going on here?

Hi! This is Brett from Source Audio. I actually signed up for the TalkBass forums just to post a reply. Hopefully I can answer your questions here.

NOTE: I took several photos and tried to upload them to this thread, but I'm not able to include them in my post. It seems that new TalkBass forum members have to be registered for a few days and create a few posts before photos are allowed... For now, I hope a plain text explanation will suffice!

EDIT: I was able to add pictures!

SA161 Potentiometer Range

The SA161 (Dual Expression Pedal) is indeed a 50 kOhm potentiometer. There are two factors that contribute to the limited range. First, on the high end (toe down), the potentiometer might not reach its full 50 kOhms. This is because potentiometers generally have a fairly wide manufacturing tolerance. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about this. On the low end of things, however (heel down), you should be able to get very close to 0 Ohms. There's one catch: in order to prevent the pedal from making a loud clicking sound, we include a small rubber disk in the mechanical design. This gives a small bit of resistance when the heel is down, preventing loud clicks. The tradeoff is that it prevents the potentiometer from achieving its full range.

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I took a pedal from our warehouse and did a quick check with an ohmmeter. In the heel down position, it got down to about 1.3 kOhm, or 2% of the full range. With additional pressure, I could get it down to 100 Ohms or less, but that's obviously not ideal.

So, I took a knife and cut away some of the rubber. I used a utility knife, but the rubber is soft enough that even a steak knife would do it.
Without the rubber, the modified pedal now has little to no rubber preventing the moving parts from coming into contact.

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At this point, I took out the ohmmeter again to measure the resistance of the potentiometer in the heel position. This time, I was able to get down to about 20 or 30 Ohms. That's only 0.05% of the full range, which is effectively zero in any real application.

The tradeoff, of course, is that now the pedal makes a clicking sound when I go to the full heel position - that's why we included the rubber in the design. It's a bit of a tradeoff - you can only really get the full range if the two pieces of metal are flush. If you want to get the full range of the potentiometer, but don't like the click, you could maybe try to cut a little less rubber than I did, or put a little piece of electrical tape over the bottom of the rubber to create a very thin barrier between the treadle and the rest of the pedal chassis. That would be a good way to find a happy medium.

[EDIT: I broke my four answers into four separate posts in order to avoid having a very long single post! Hope that makes sense...]

I hope that info is helpful. Let me know if you have additional questions!
Brett

 

[TheSleeve]

SA161 Included Allen Wrench

To answer your question about the Allen wrench, it can be used to adjust the physical resistance or "tightness" of the treadle to your liking! Just put the position in the toe down position and look in under where your heel goes. You'll see the slot for the Allen wrench there.As you might expect, clockwise rotation tightens the treadle and counterclockwise rotation loosens it. (Righty-tighty, Lefty-loosey!)

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[TheSleeve]

Using SA161 with Pedals Requiring a Tip-Sleeve Expression Pedal

Regarding the TS vs TRS and the differences in resistances, unfortunately this is a tough problem to solve. There is no real standard among pedal manufacturers. There are three configurations that are fairly common:
Config 1 - TRS plug, Tip wiper (used by Boss/Roland, Moog, Behringer, and Source Audio, to name a few)
Config 2 - TRS plug, Ring wiper (used by Zoom and Korg)
Config 3 - TS plug, Tip wiper (used by Line 6 and Eventide)

So, we had to choose one of these configurations, and Config 1 seemed to be the most common option. Unfortunately, it's not easy to create a design that satisfies all three options!

Using the SA161 with an Eventide pedal will work to some extent - electrically, the ring and sleeve will be shorted together, so the middle of the range of motion will get you the highest resistance, and moving either fully up or fully down will get you the lowest resistance. It's not ideal, but at least it's functional. The best solution for controlling that particular pedal, however, would be to get an expression pedal that was designed with a TS plug.

 

[TheSleeve]

Using the SA161's Sensor Output and Expression Output 1 Simultaneously

The sensor output and expression output 1 share the same potentiometer circuit (whereas expression 2 is on a separate circuit). If the sensor output and expression output 1 jacks had the same configuration, then this wouldn't matter. However, that isn't the case! The expression circuit is passive, whereas the sensor circuit is active. The sensor jack takes a 4-conductor cable (TRRS) with one of those conductors bringing in DC power coming from the connected effects pedal. When the sensor output is connected to an external pedal, the supplied DC voltage is fed to the potentiometer, where it creates a current. This creates a different voltage drop across the potentiometer and throws off the behavior of the expression output that is sitting on the same circuit. Keep in mind, the expression output will certainly still do something when you change the position of the treadle, but you will not get the full range and the behavior might not match what you expect because of the influence of the sensor circuit.

In other words, the circuit was designed so that only one thing should be plugged in (either expression 1 or sensor) at any given time.

 

[Adamixoye]

Hey Brett,

Many thanks for addressing all of these questions! I really do genuinely appreciate all the questions Source Audio in general and you in particular have answered for me over the last two weeks. I'm not sure how to say that any more strongly without being weird(er) about it. I know I've asked a lot and you guys (and again, you in particular) really have gone above and beyond. Everything has been answered to my satisfaction (although I'm still looking forward to seeing the HH3/M-series video), and now it's a matter of toying with things to set them up practically for what I want to do.

I will have to test everything you've said. I would rather not mutilate the rubber stoppers on the Dual EP while I'm still checking it out. I can probably live with one of my aforementioned solutions (either just using and programming it in reverse using the range knob and a TS cable, or using a TRS cable and only using the first 50% of the treadle action) if I can do something with the stoppers and zero point that I'm happy with.

P.S. Since Roger said you're in on product development, at the risk of being super annoying let me advocate one last time for an Eventide setting on the forthcoming Digital Expression Pedal. I guess if you already have a Line6 setting like on the HH3 you would only need to have a way to modify the range (25 kOhm for Eventide vs. 10 kOhm for Line6). Maybe you also want to consider modifying the pedal somehow in order to get that proper zero point without altering the rubber stoppers? Just a thought. Maybe that is mechanically more problematic than it superficially seems to me.

 

[TheSleeve]

Adamixoye - No problem, it's my pleasure!

I agree that the mod/hack involving rubber stopper is not ideal. We'll certainly keep that in mind going forward. It's possible that a minor industrial design tweak could resolve that issue.

By the way, our director of marketing is still working on editing the M5 tutorial video - hopefully we'll have something to share before too long!

 

[bassvirtuoso]

By the way, I saw the Hub Manager 2.0 in action today. It is really well done. I hope that we will have something up late this week. Tweaking or sharing pedal settings, scenes and collections of scenes is a piece of cake!

Think we'll still see this by the weekend?

 

[TheSleeve]

Think we'll still see this by the weekend?

Hi bassvirtuoso,

I can't promise an exact release date, but Jesse told me he's aiming to have a beta version available next week.