PYE Compressor/Limiter Thread *boards shipping* BOM up!

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Spencerleehorton said:
been well over a month wait for the pcbs now, i have emailed and tried to contact but nothing back?
starting to get worried now!!

Sadly I am in the same boat - nothing in the post, emailed a couple of times to say hello but heard nothing back :(

But I am the patient type, so I guess I'll just see what happens.
 
Heres hoping your boards arrive, soon hopefully. The level of support for this project has been woefully inadequate from the git-go. But that is Ok in a way. It forced some of us building these things, to get busy figuring them out rather than just following an assembly manual. I learned a lot on this build.
 
mdainsd said:
Heres hoping your boards arrive, soon hopefully. The level of support for this project has been woefully inadequate from the git-go. But that is Ok in a way. It forced some of us building these things, to get busy figuring them out rather than just following an assembly manual. I learned a lot on this build.

Yes - I've read this thread a couple of times and it's great to see how you lot worked through issues collaboratively and in public.  I think often that sort of thing is done by the smart/experienced/highly-motivated guys, but behind the scenes, so use mere mortals never see it in action.  Thanks!
 
Made some substantial progress on this project. Here's a what I've found:

In order for the compressor to operate correctly you HAVE to make the discrete oscillator. The interaction of the original blocking oscillator with the rest of the circuit is quite large and there's no way you can just drop in a 555 circuit and hope it will work out fine. With discrete oscillator the circuit requires almost no tuning, all ratios and the threshold are correct. Threshold seems to be in dBV, not dBu.

For those who chose the 555 chip as an oscillator. Check your ratios! You may have to fine tune the PWM mark-space ratio to get the ratios correct. The threshold will probably be off as well.

Now, here's the curious problem that I have both with the 555 and discrete oscillators. When the compression kicks in, there's a strange looking waveform, almost as if some low frequency modulation is going on. This only happens when the compressor goes from no compression to compression (when the input level increases). I'm including the picture of the waveform. You can see that there are two places where compressor starts to work. They both look different, but conditions were absolutely the same.

I wonder what other, brighter then me, members of this forum can suggest.
 

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Are these the Pye boards from AC Sound?
Sent them money last year and have now sent a few messages to check with no response.
Looking for the website finds it down.
I am hoping this is not an illness, or someone disbanding a business and walking off with monies.
Word was that the boards were to ship in March or April as memory serves.
Apologies if I'm totally off base here.

Thank you,

John
 
headstack said:
Are these the Pye boards from AC Sound?
Sent them money last year and have now sent a few messages to check with no response.
Looking for the website finds it down.
I am hoping this is not an illness, or someone disbanding a business and walking off with monies.
Word was that the boards were to ship in March or April as memory serves.
Apologies if I'm totally off base here.

Thank you,

John

Nope, you are on the money... excuse the not-very-funny pun there  :-\

Before the AC Sound store went down, the PYE boards changed status from pre-order to available for a few days.  For a while the whole main AC Sound web site redirected to a completely different company, but then it came back.  But the store has been down for a while now.  I'm not getting response to my emails either, so waiting is really the only option at this stage.

I'm desperately hoping that the issue is something like faulty boards from the board manufacturer, and so they've taken down the store and stopped selling for a while until they sort it out.  But who knows.

Cheers,
A.

[edit: stupid grammar stuffups!]
 
headstack said:
Are these the Pye boards from AC Sound?
Sent them money last year and have now sent a few messages to check with no response.
Looking for the website finds it down.
I am hoping this is not an illness, or someone disbanding a business and walking off with monies.

In the same boat too...
I've bought pcb's from Abe before without issue.
 
Ilya said:
Made some substantial progress on this project. Here's a what I've found:

In order for the compressor to operate correctly you HAVE to make the discrete oscillator. The interaction of the original blocking oscillator with the rest of the circuit is quite large and there's no way you can just drop in a 555 circuit and hope it will work out fine. With discrete oscillator the circuit requires almost no tuning, all ratios and the threshold are correct. Threshold seems to be in dBV, not dBu.

For those who chose the 555 chip as an oscillator. Check your ratios! You may have to fine tune the PWM mark-space ratio to get the ratios correct. The threshold will probably be off as well.

Now, here's the curious problem that I have both with the 555 and discrete oscillators. When the compression kicks in, there's a strange looking waveform, almost as if some low frequency modulation is going on. This only happens when the compressor goes from no compression to compression (when the input level increases). I'm including the picture of the waveform. You can see that there are two places where compressor starts to work. They both look different, but conditions were absolutely the same.

I wonder what other, brighter then me, members of this forum can suggest.

I also had problems with thumping on the attack of a fast transient.
Unfortunately, I didn't pinpoint the solution to an exact component or setting.
What I know is that this occurred during the tests with one transistor that was ill behaving (TR12) and I managed to completely mistune all the trimmers. So what was going on I'm not sure.
I was obsessing with getting equal signals on both channels so I went to replace most of the transistors with pairs of hfe matched ones, and I also removed trimmers R41, R42 & R44 on the channel that had problems. So after that thumping on trasients stopped, but my troubles were still in other areas.
After a lot of headache, final fix was replacing shorted trimmer on the other channel. That made them behave exactly the same.
And to be matched, I also replaced pots with stepped switches.
Now they're working.
And I'm using 555 on the oscillator! No problems with that.
:)

Luka
 
shot said:
I also had problems with thumping on the attack of a fast transient.
Unfortunately, I didn't pinpoint the solution to an exact component or setting.
What I know is that this occurred during the tests with one transistor that was ill behaving (TR12) and I managed to completely mistune all the trimmers. So what was going on I'm not sure.

Thanks for your input. Unfirtunately, changing those transistors to low hfe type didn't change anything for me  :(. Still looking for what's wrong with the unit
 
Collective Cases did it for a while, I thought.  Perhaps he has an inside track on contacting Abe.  I received my boards, but they were in the initial offering.
 
Hi All,

yes i fear the worst with Abe and AC Sound, i will be getting in touch with the small claims court and pursuing my moneys as regards Abe, i do suggest everyone else owed does the same.
In the mean time i have ordered two pcbs from Dan at Collective Cases, very nice man.

regards

Spence.
 
I've finally ironed out everything and planning to release the module for my system within a couple of months. There will be an extensive guide (like other guides for the existing modules) with detailed test and calibration instructions.

http://www.rackneve.com/PYE_compressor_announce
 
Ilya said:
I've finally ironed out everything and planning to release the module for my system within a couple of months. There will be an extensive guide (like other guides for the existing modules) with detailed test and calibration instructions.

http://www.rackneve.com/PYE_compressor_announce

Great news!  Count me in for a pair (PCB only), thank you.

When you have a chance I'd be interested to hear more about your design (e.g. discrete oscillator details, input/output transformer requirements, maybe even a demo...)  Or I could just wait for you to actually release it, I guess ;)

Cheers,
A.
 

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