Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Tech => Topic started by: clivey on January 28, 2006, 03:06:29 PM
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Have any of you guys ever used one of these?
I just recieved one yesterday, and after using it for 4 hours have come to four possible conclusions:
1. I am an idiot, and just can't work it.
2. The unit is deffective, and doesn't want to work.
3. I have been duped out of £300 for a large paper weight, masquerading as a speaker simulator.
4. Possible combinations of the above.
I am hoping to god that the real answer is 2, but iv'e never used one of these before, so I don't know if these are faults or not!
First of all, with everything set up, and all the controls set to zero, there is still an audible signal - a horrible, distorted sound, not unlike extreme digital clipping. At low amp volumes, turning up the filter control (the speaker simulator part) masks this horrible sound, and produces exactly what I want to hear - a close aproximation of my amp + cab.
However, the further I push the amps volume, the more prominent this horrible clipping sound becomes, to the point that it almost takes over the sound completely - deffinately not a natural amp sound, and completely unusable. I stress that this is not due to my amp: both amps I have produced this same sound. There is aslo no way I can be clipping the input of the Palmer: it's designed to take up to 120Watts of power from an amp; my wee Cornford is only 20Watts!! What the hell is this nasty sound, and why can I not get rid of it?
Secondly, the ground lift switches. As i understand, these are supposed to help reduce ground loop hum. Well, there's not too much hum in my set up, but I like to be thorough, and make sure everything works as supposed to. Hitting the ground lift switches doesn't seam to reduce hum so much as completely change the tone in the circuit - it seams to get rid of the nasty sound described above! However, it replaces it with nasty screamy feedback, and weird filter sweep effects as I move around the room! That was with the Cornford. When trying with a Marshall, this proceeded to blow the Marshall's fuse.
Now. I'm by no means an expert, and as I said before, Iv'e never used a palmer before. However, both the situations above make using this thing completely out of the question - nasty clipping sound, filter sweepy feedback and blowing amp fuses doesn't sound like a usefull bit of gear to me.
Is this normal? Is the thing broken? Am I an idiot for asking this? Am I an idiot for buying this in the first place?
Any help would be much appreciated: palmer is a tiny company in Germany, and there seams to be no way to contact them directly about any of this.
Appologies for the long post!
Cheers,
Clive
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http://palmergear.com/
This is the site for the exclusive US dealer. Hopefully they can help.
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Cheers, was going to send them an email - I guess they'll at least tell me if somethings wrong! Slightly more worrying, though, is finding someone over here who can do something about it - fix it, or exchange it. There's no warrenty info or anything like that with the manual. Hopefully the guys I bought it from will exchange it, but I won't be able to talk to them till next week.
Thanks all the same!