Re: Germanium Transistors, Noise and Leakage

Posted by rocket88 on Aug 03, 2016; 3:45am
URL: http://guitar-fx-layouts.238.s1.nabble.com/Germanium-Transistors-Noise-and-Leakage-tp32320p32322.html

+1 to getting a DCA55 for transistor testing. To add to what Travis has already said, there are some Ge transistors that are just noisy. Not to mention IME I've found that some of the higher gain pedals have happened to be noisier then lower gain ones, especially with Ge builds. Not saying that this is always the case, just what I've experienced. For example, in my oracle build I had used gt309 transistors in the gains of the original build that 112/304hfe respectively and it was a noisy fucker and sounded kinda like Si, as in harsher rather then smooth distortion. I swapped them for 2 mp41a transistors with both gains of ~100hfe. This not only gave me a good amount of fuzz, but it smooth, and damn near silent, and you can ask Travis he tried it during pedal-geddon 2016.

To make matters even more difficult sometimes it's not the model of th transistor, but the batch. I've had many Ge transistors that the noise varies with batch. One batch is great and quiet, while the next may sound great, but noisy hell. Not to mention in one build a set of transistors will be noisy, but in another they're not. Tbh, this is one of the reasons that got me first started on buying my Ge transistors in bulk, which was way before I started my company.