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Second only to capacitors, resistors (and their variable cousins, the potentiometer) are the most common passive components found in stompbox designs. So here's an overview on types, what they do, and how to use them. Note: This content is about the practical application of resistors and potentiometers, as used in guitar and audio circuits. So I will avoid re-hashing all the basics of Ohms law, reading color codes, or other topics that are readily available on the web. See the resources section at the end for links.
A resistor is a pretty simple beast: it is made up of a compound that resists the flow of current. It has two leads and is not polarity-sensitive; in other words you don't have to worry about the order of the leads. First up, a brief list of things to know about resistors:
Resistor values are quoted in Ohms (). Resistors have various power ratings, signifying the power they can accept. For stompbox use (typically 9-18 volt DC supplies) 1/4 watt power rating is fine. If you like puzzles and memorization, you can learn and memorize the color-coding of resistor values. Or, if you are like me, you cancheat. The most commonly used resistor type in stompboxery is carbon film. You can use other types, but carbon film is cheap, reliable and easily obtained. If you lack a specific resistor value, you can use the formulas for Resistors in Parallel/Series to cobble together a specific value. Most resistors have a specified tolerance (for example 1% or 5%). So it is rare that a standard resistor will measure out to exactly its claimed value.
Metal Film
1%
Carbon Composition
5%
used in guitar and effect circuitry. Common, reliable and inexpensive. A bit more expensive, but you get a closer tolerance. Additionally, metal film as a compound generally has lower noise and better temperature stability. An older compound, found in vintage electronics. Sometimes employed by boutique builders for mojo or tone.
so what Im going to cover here are the basic types, operation, and uses specifically for guitar audio.
Types of Pots
Pots come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The most common type we use in pedals and amps are usually of the 24mm or 16mm round metal can type. There are also multi-gang pots (which stack multiple independent pots on one shaft), slider pots, trimmer pots, etc.
In the case of a standard pot, as shown above, we have a round case with three connectors and a shaft that turns. Heres what it looks like in a schematic:
The pot has three lugs and by convention they are numbered 1,2, and 3. Pin 2 is called the wiper.
Tapers
Pots come in different tapers. The taper defines how the resistance of the pot changes in relationship to turning the shaft.
Linear Taper: The simplest form. The rotation of the knob directly corresponds to the resistance change in linear fashion. Audio/Logarithmic Taper: This taper compensates for how the human ear perceives changes in volume. It has a different curvethe resistance change as you turn the knob is not linear. Note that audio taper is the same thing as logarithmic (or log as you will sometimes see it). Just different names. Reverse Audio/Log Taper :This has the same curve as the audio taper, but in reverse.
The following diagram shows the relation of resistance change as you turn the pot knob
Which leads us to the most common first question about pots: when do I use linear and when do I use audio? The answer is, do whatever the schematic or layout you are working from specifies. Volume controls typically use an audio taper because it is designed to change the resistance on a curve that is smoothed out given how our brains interpret changes in volume. Linear tapers are usually used for other parts of the circuit such as tone controls, distortion levels, etc. But not always! The good news is that you can interchange linear and audio tapers in a pinch. If a project calls for a 100k audio taper and you only have a 100k linear taper, the linear one will work. In other words, the exact same changes in resistance will be available on audio/log and linear tapers, it just depends on where you have the knob turned to. In general, stick to the specified taper for best results.
and
So a 100k linear taper would be B100K. A 1k audio taper would be A1K. There, now you know the code. It should be noted that back in the old days the A and B were reversedif you are working some old mystery pots, the above coding scheme may need to be reversed.
Here we have a potentiometer where lug three is the input, and lugs 1 and 2 are connected together to form the output. As you turn the shaft, the resistance decreases. You are forming a simple resistor whose value is variable. Wait a minute! you might say. Why do I need to connect lug 1 to lug 2 if all I need is a variable resistor, like this:
Well that certainly works the same way. But what happens if the potentiometer fails for some reason (age, poor quality, dirty, etc.)? If the wiper (which is the rotating part of the component and probably most prone to failure) shorts out, it will let the full amount of signal through. By attaching lug 1 to lug 2, we are building in a fail-safe. This ensures that the circuit is never completely openthere will always be some resistive path in case the wiper goes south.
A Volume Control
Now lets look at a more interesting example: a volume control. Assume we have a simple stompbox that does distortion or overdrive or something else interesting. At the end of the circuit we have an output. Wouldnt it be nice to control the output level (or volume) of the pedal?
Here we have the signal going to lug 3, the output coming out of lug 2, and lug 1 connected to ground. To see how this works, assume you have the shaft turned all the way clockwise, i.e. turned all the way up. In this configuration, there is little if any resistance across lugs 2 and 3 so the maximum output signal goes to the output. As you turn the shaft counter-clockwise, the resistance across 2/3 increases and the resistance across 1/2 decreases. This causes more of the signal to be dumped to ground. This dumping essentially sends the signal into oblivion, thereby lowering the overall output level. So if you think about it, you are never really turning the volume up! The volume or level in the circuit is always running at full tilt. What you are doing the above volume control is actually attenuating (making smaller) the full volume that was there to begin with.
To sag the voltage, well introduce a pot between the battery positive connection and the circuit board, like this:
Now, as we turn the potentiometer, we increase the resistance between the battery and the circuit, thereby lowering both the current and voltage.
A Passive Mixer
Generally you want any mixing circuits to be active (i.e. to include opamp or transistor components to match and balance the inputs). However, you can squeak by in some cases with a passive mixer. Although the passive design can load down the input devices, it will work fine in many cases. Here we are going to use an audio taper pot for each input channel:
A Fine Pot
You may have seen pedals with a speed or time knob. Typically speed is for LFO (low frequency oscillator) such as in a phaser or chorus. And time knobs are in time-based effects such as delays. And sometimes, you may have seen an arrangement of two knobs for speed or time; one to control the coarse value and one for fine value. In other words, the coarse pot makes big changes in values, the fine pot makes small changes. The fun part here is that it is super easy to implement such a scheme: just use two pots instead of one. In the following example, we augment an existing 100K pot with a new 1k pot:
The input accepts the signal. It passes through a R1 and C1 which form a filter network. R2 and C2 form the other side of the network. (Note the different component values). As you move the pot shaft, more signal is sent to one side or the other of the tone network. The wiper of the pot (lug 2) is the output. This is a simplified explanation of the tone control, but it shows how the wiper allows you shift the signal from one side of a circuit to another.
A Note about Math, Science, and Technical Stuff: It seems the norm Wrapping Up
Pots are everywhere. Because they are so useful I guess. Here are some additional
resources on the web for further research: The Secret Life of Pots: http://www.geofex.com/Article_Folders/potsecrets/potscret.htm Beginners Guide to Pots: http://sound.westhost.com/pots.htm
To get inside it, you notice those little metal tabs bent over the housing on the top? I took a fine bladed screwdriver and bent them up....
When they're all bent up, you can lift the shaft and phenolic wafer assembly out of the back housing like this.
All the fun stuff appears to be inaccessible under that black plastic cover. Actually, that cover performs a couple of very useful functions; it serves to hold the wiper in place, and also interacts with the stop on the case to set the mechanical rotation limits. If you remove the tab on the plastic disk and reassemble the pot, it will now rotate freely 360 degrees. Here's a little better view of the shaft/wafer/wiper assembly.
Looking closely, you can see that the shaft is held onto the plastic disk by being mechanically squashed into place. That is quick, and makes for cheap pots, but it can't be removed and successfully reassembled. That is a peculiarity of this brand, as some pots can be disassembled and reassembled successfully. In the next picture, I've used a big pair of diagonal cutters to remove the plastic disk and the metal wipers. This exposes the bare conductor assembly.
The whole works of the pot, excepting the rotating wiper are printed on the phenolic wafer. The connections to the ends of the resistive material are a conductive metal material, as is the circle of conductor that connects to the center contact. We can now begin to see our control's kinship to Ohm's variable resistors. The resistive material is a circular band of carbon-containing gunk that is printed onto the phenolic wafer, overlapping the metalization to the two outside lugs at either end. The wiper is just a sliding bridge from the center metalization ring to the outer resistive ring. The contact to the metalization is fairly reliable, but the contact to the resistive ring may be intermittent, so the connection to the outer ring is made by three contacts in parallel, as shown by the three tracks the contacts make in the top of the resistive material. Those gouges and scratches are a product of the delicate manner in which I removed the plastic wafer, so ignore those. With this view, a couple of things fairly leap out at us. This is a linear pot, which is exactly what we should have from a continuous, homogeneous strip of resistive material. That is to say, the wiper traverses an equal amount of resistance in ohms per degree turned. If we wanted to make a non-linear pot, where the amount of resistance per degree turned were not linear, we could mess with the resistive strip to make it nonlinear. This is in fact how it's done. The strip can be made to get skinnier toward on end or the other; a narrower strip has more resistance per unit length and so the resistance per unit degree turned will change. This is not desirable from reliability reasons, as we'd still like to have three contacts to the resistive strip, and that isn't possible if the strip gets skinnier. We could also change the thickness or composition of the material from one end of the resistive strip to the other. It turns out that printing a varying thickness is very difficult to do cheaply. Also, varying the composition in any kind of smooth fashion is very hard, not a repeatable manufacturing step. What makers of pots actually do is to use straight-line approximations to a nonlinear resistive curve, and print in sections. For instance, the first 1/3 of the circumference of the pot's resistive band may be printed with one resistive material, the second another, and the third yet another. This allows the maker to come reasonably close to some taper curve. Other things are that we can see the way pots wear out. The wiper literally wears a path through the conductive strip. When all three contacts get all the way through, they don't make contact any more, and the pot quits functioning. During the normal life of the pot (that is, the wear-out process) the bits of resistive material gouged and work from the resistive strip stay around and can actually lift the wipers from the resistive strip. If there is a
DC voltage across the pot when this happens, the wiper loses and then regains contact at a different DC level than it left, so it makes a scratch or click. Pots used to be made with taps part way around. This was just a fourth terminal connected to a strip of metalization running under the middle of the resistive material part way round. The metalization on the ends that the wipers touch when the pot is turned all the way to one end or the other can be extended further around the path of the resistive band so that the resistive band can start later in the pot's mechanical rotation and/or end sooner. The maker can print metalization "dead zones" in the middle of the rotation where nothing much happens resistively. It's very flexible.
You could hypothetically scrape material off the resistor band and make a higher resistance, odd taper pot, but there are better ways to do that.
There are other tapers, but they have very specialized uses. Our problem is this: If we need a specialized taper to recreate some effect, how do we get it if we can't go buy one? That leads us to tapering resistors. If we set up the easiest, simplest pot to get, a linear taper pot of resistance R, and then connect a "tapering resistor" across the wiper and CCW lug, we get the situation shown in the following diagram. For clarity, I've separated the resistance above the wiper and the resistor below the wiper into two separate resistors. It makes the calculations much easier.
We're assuming the total pot resistance R is split into an R1 at the CW side and R2 on the CCW side, with R3 paralleled with R2. We'll let "a" represent the fraction of the total resistance R that the wiper has turned, and "b" be the fraction of R that R3 is. When we get out the algebra books and do the math, we find out that we can show that the ratio of output voltage to input voltage is that odd looking fraction in the picture. When we calculate out the results, we find that the divider ratio of Vout to Vin is shaped something like a true logarithmic tapered pot if we pick the right value for b. If b happens to be 1/4 to 1/5, the resulting voltage division is remarkably close to a true logarithmic pot, probably closer than a two segment approximation that we could buy! Wow! No more waiting for volume control pots! Here's what we see when we do the math:
Unfortunately there's a gotcha in there. It's true that the voltage division ratio of this rig is arbitrarily close to that of a log taper pot. However, neither the load seen by whatever drives Vin or the source resistance as seen by the input of whatever is connected to Vout is close to what would exist for a real log pot of value R. In fact, the load on Vin varies from 1/(1+1/b)*R up to R. That means that if we're trying to do a log taper with b = 1/4, the load on Vin will be as much as 0.2* R. This may be OK, but you have to keep it in mind. In general, if you have a voltage source that can drive a load of 1/4 to 1/5 of R and a load on Vout that has an input impedance much higher than that same 1/4 to 1/5 of R, this is a good replacement for an audio or log taper pot. In a bit of good fortune, if you hook up the tapering resistor from the CW or hot side of the pot to the wiper, the pot emulates a reverse log pot, just as well as it did a log pot when hooked to the CCW side.
There are two ways to hook up a pot. You can hook it up as a three terminal voltage divider as we've seen above, or as a variable resistance, the two-terminal connection (sometimes called a rheostat connection for historical reasons).
In the two terminal connection, the resistance through the pot is what we're interested in, not the voltage divider ratio. It turns out that the tapering trick works here, but only partially. If we want to make a reverse log tapering pot, we're in! However, there is no way to get a simulation of a log taper pot in the two terminal connection. For that we have to buy real audio taper pots. Here's what you get if do the series resistor connection:
Note that the CW terminal is unused. This is usually tied to the wiper, although that is not seen here. You can't simply put the tapering resistor from the CW terminal to the wiper and get a log taper pot emulation, like you could with the voltage divider connection. That just gives you the reverse of this graph, with the resistance starting to decrease slowly and then faster. The two terminal connection is non-polar; it looks the same however you hook it up. The only thing that changes is which end of the graph you start from. In the math examples I left b, which is the fraction of the pot resistance that the tapering resistor is, as a parameter rather than making it a fixed ratio. Usually, people pick a value of b of about 4 or 5. Those curves are close to the classical mathematical description of a log or reverse log pot. I left b a parameter to show you that you can make your own taper by selecting a different value of b. For a semi-log taper, use a b of about 2.
Szia
sajnos ez nem ilyen egyszer, ha az volna nem gyrtank a logaritmikus potmtereket. Ilyen mdszerrel nem lehet az egyik tpust a msikba vinni. Viszont az ltalad lert mdszerrel igen j pontossggal el lehet rni egy vals logaritmikus fggvnyt (pl. 100k-s potmter s 22k-s ellenlls), amirl sokak azt lltjk sokkal jobb a gyri karakterisztiknl.
dv, Oszi
Akkor ezek szerint a 22%-os szably az rvnyes? Nekem 12% derengett rgi emlkeimbl. dv: Krisztin Hali, sok erstt csinltam mr. A 12% szerintem jobb. Itt van egy cikk is, ahol meg a 15%-ot tartjk megfelelnek. Vglis csodk nincsenek, ahhoz, hogy normlis legyen a HANGERSZABLYZS, valami ilyesmi mindenkppen kell: http://sound.westhost.com/project01.htm gbenyov
More Sharing ServicesShare|Share on facebookShare on myspaceShare on googleShare on twitter Better Volume Control (Pt 1) The volume control in a hi-fi amp or preamp (or any other audio device, for that matter), is a truly simple concept, right? Wrong. In order to get a smooth increase in level, the potentiometer (pot) must be logarithmic to match the non-linear characteristics of our hearing. A linear pot used for volume is quite unsatisfactory. Unless you pay serious money, the standard "log" pot you buy from electronics shops is not log at all, but is comprised of two linear sections, each with a different resistance gradient. The theory is that between the
two they will make a curve which is "close enough" to log (or audio) taper. As many will have found out, this is rarely the case, and a pronounced 'discontinuity' is often apparent as the control is rotated. As with all pots used as volume controls, the first 10% of rotation causes a very large variation in level (essentially from 'off' to quietly audible). A 'true' log response over the full range of perhaps 100dB is not really useful, because most of the time the gain is varied over a relatively small range. 25dB of variation is a power ratio of 316:1 - this will normally be the range over which any volume control is used.
The other advantage of the 'fake' log pot is that linear pots usually have better tracking (and power handling) than commercially available 'log' pots, so there will be less variation in the signal between left and right channels. This is improved even further by the added resistor, which will allow a cheap carbon pot to equal a good quality conductive plastic component (at least for accuracy - I shall not enter the sound quality debate here). Make sure that the source impedance is low (from a buffer stage) and that it can drive the final impedance when the control is fully advanced (it may be as low as 9k Ohms with a 100k pot). Use of a high impedance drive will ruin the law of the pot, which will no longer resemble anything useful. Better Volume Control (Pt. 2 - Further Ideas) Originally designed by Peter Baxandall (of feedback tone control fame, amongst many other designs), there is also an active version of the 'Better Volume Control', which uses an opamp and a pot in the feedback loop. The log law is almost identical to that for the passive design above, but it can provide gain as well as attenuation. An example of this design may be found in Project 24, and the circuit for the basic idea is shown in Figure 3.
BAL = 2.5 * VOL For example: VOL = 10k log, BAL = 25k linear Adding a resistor 'R' gives opportunity for two interesting improvements of the standard balance-volumecontrol networks. Note that the switch is optional, and may safely be left out (i.e. shorted).
If the resistive tracks of BAL are not absolutely symmetrical current through at least one of the sliding contacts will not be exactly zero at centre position (adding the switch 'S' would cure this entirely - but I doubt that there is any need for it). If track resistance of a carbon pot (worst case scenario!) changes due to varying pressure of the sliding contact (induced by acoustical resonance, just like in the carbon microphones of veteran telephones), the load on the previous stage will change (but I suspect it might be really difficult to find a stage that will 'feel' it).
Thanks to 'R', the balance control operates conveniently slowly near the centre position and overall volume is affected significantly less than without it. This leads to another option: B) R = 4k7 (R = ~0.47*VOL) The balance knob works without affecting the overall volume This will give best operating convenience since the sound stage then moves from the left to the right without significant overall volume change. Input voltage on both channels constant and equal, the sum of Left and Right channel power remains approximately (0.2dB) constant across about 80% of the dial (which still works conveniently slowly about the centre position). I decided on the .47-factor after some PC-simulation and checked it by implementation in my preamp afterwards:
It works as expected indeed (there is just a slight increase of overall volume at the extreme right and left positions). I don't want to miss out on having a balance control any more, since there are in fact records which suffer from severe channel imbalance. Moving the armchair or the speakers is not a convenient cure for that. Moving the soloist two feet to the left or right without changing the overall volume, just by activating the balance knob, is the way to go. Any compromise between 'golden-ear -' and 'maximum-convenience -' versions is possible by selecting a suitable 'R/Vol factor' between 1.0 and 0.47 . The impedance of these "enhanced" networks is approximately that of 'VOL' alone (if R = Vol and BAL ~ 2 * VOL), so you can add BAL and R to any "purist's" design without changing critical parameters of the circuit (4-6dB attenuation by R will occur, of course, so you will have to add about 5 or 10 degrees of arc on the volume dial in future). Even when BAL is set to the extremes there is only a moderate change of load (max.: -30%) which will not upset any reasonable preamp. If there already is a standard network in your amp, it is easy to add the additional resistors ... Just solder them across the corresponding pins of the balance pot (on one channel from centre to the left and on the other from centre to the right!) The volume pot is not involved.
Bernd Ludwig