18Watt.com

Looking for the best attenuator. Most transparent yet effective allowance to push those tubes at low volumes without masking or changing the beauty of the amp.

I like the Weber Mini Mass (get the 50W version). I've heard people also like one called the Alex Attenuator. There's a couple other popular ones too. I like the Weber because it sounds good and costs less than most of the other ones I've heard people like.

AFAIK, these 3 seems to be the best right now :

Aracom PRX150-PRO2
Tone King IronMan
Rivera Rockcrusher

d2_racing wrote:AFAIK, these 3 seems to be the best right now :

Aracom PRX150-PRO2
Tone King IronMan
Rivera Rockcrusher

Ouch! For $500, $600, and $850, they better be the best.

The Alex Attenuator is now the Scumback DBL and is $449 but I saw no power rating for it. The Weber Mini Mass 50W is $115 and the 50 Watt Mass is $205. The Mass has several more adjustments than the Mini Mass and the Scumback DBL.

KennyO

The Recycled Sound Power Plug is ~$90. It's pretty basic, mostly a Gerald Weber style attenuator with an added capacitor, but for the price I've found it to be very useful.

CurtissRobin wrote:The Alex Attenuator is now the Scumback DBL and is $449 but I saw no power rating for it. The Weber Mini Mass 50W is $115 and the 50 Watt Mass is $205. The Mass has several more adjustments than the Mini Mass and the Scumback DBL.

KennyO

ZP recommended the Mini Mass to me, and I like the price better than the others, so I bought it and it's been perfect for me. The price tag of all the other ones makes me completely uninterested in them. For the cost of some of those attenuators, I can build a lower watt amp, or an amp with a MV or VVM. Besides that, I've seen the mini mass as cheap as $65 used on TGP.

JMPGuitars wrote:I like the Weber Mini Mass (get the 50W version). I've heard people also like one called the Alex Attenuator. There's a couple other popular ones too. I like the Weber because it sounds good and costs less than most of the other ones I've heard people like.

plus 1000% save your money the mini mass all the way

Do you guys still stand by your Mini Mass recommends? I'm increasingly tempted to try one. I need to tame a Rivera and a Mesa.

soundchaser59 wrote:Do you guys still stand by your Mini Mass recommends? I'm increasingly tempted to try one. I need to tame a Rivera and a Mesa.

Yes, just double your wattage. If your amp is 50 watts, get a 100 watt attenuator. I bought a 50 watt attenuator for my 18 watt amps.

I've been looking at attenuators too. I'm getting a 100 Watt Weber MASS for the new amp I'm building (KT66 35 Watt). The MASS models have inductors in them so they provide reactance back to the amp so they don't mess so much with the response. Here's some evidence for that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41RD9ARJ5Ms

Added to the decent sound, you can order one with a line-out and with the device turned all the way down you can DI your amp into a DAW and use speaker impulses (in real time too), so you could use your amp in silence at night with headphones. This is my plan, anyway.

ezietsman wrote:I've been looking at attenuators too. I'm getting a 100 Watt Weber MASS for the new amp I'm building (KT66 35 Watt). The MASS models have inductors in them so they provide reactance back to the amp so they don't mess so much with the response. Here's some evidence for that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41RD9ARJ5Ms

Added to the decent sound, you can order one with a line-out and with the device turned all the way down you can DI your amp into a DAW and use speaker impulses (in real time too), so you could use your amp in silence at night with headphones. This is my plan, anyway.

Let us know how that works out for you. I'm curious how the tone going through the attenuator will handle it.

I just recently posted some stuff about DI'ing into speaker impulse models and monitoring through headphones on Wattkins.

DIY reactive dummy load (inductor, caps and resistors on a heatsink) with line out and tweed tone controls, into my Mackie mixer with firewire, into Guitarix software with only speaker modelling turned on. Sounded just as good as micing the amp through a real speaker, into the mixer and monitoring in the headphones. Totally silent recording (well acoustic string sound only) and it sounded really good.

I also regularly use the dummy load line output into a SS amp to re-amp into a real guitar speaker for tv volume and lower playing at home. Been on the attenuation journey for years like many others and this has given me the best result at those really low volumes that VVR can't get down to. Of course much above that and it's VVR all the way for me.

Part of the reason I want to not have VVR on my next amp is that they (JTM45) are output limited by their OTs (so I read). So, if I added the VVR, I'm basically forced to use it or damage everyone's hearing but turning down the VVR will sacrifice any compression effects from the output transformer. On the 18 watter the volume difference between a nice fat overdrive and clean (especially on the Les Paul) is actually quite big. I've struggled at gigs to be audible when doing this (the rest of the band didn't change their volumes so not all the amp's fault). This seems to be less of a problem on the few good JTM45 and Trainwreck demos I've seen on Youtube.

Katopan, I guessed all 3 amps in your clip wrong. Go figure.