Anyone else?
So recently i noticed when i plug my mother into a fx pedal, typically a guitar stomp such as line 6 DD4 or bluesky reverb, the output to the mixer gets about twice as loud as when i have it directly plugged into the mixer.
I dont recall this happening before and think something has changed.
I ran a few experiments tonight, and it isn’t finger troubles.
i also noticed that with a pair of AudioTechnica ATH-M50’s direct to the mother, i have to have the volume maxed to get any real useable volume. The earphones have 35ohms sleeve to ring/tip.
Thanks Istvan.
To confirm, did you try mother by itself then with pedals to see if there was a difference? (The bigsky i used was on loan and returned so i couldn’t try it again in the below…)
Did some more experimenting -
Most my pedals have 1Mohm in, and a variety of out values.
My TC Ditto has an out of 100ohm while the rest are 1Kohm-10Kohm out. (Big sky is 100ohm out)
32 > FX > mixer direct, all with TS (mono) cables.
Leaving the mixer and 32 knobs untouched with the 32 droning, i swapped a few of the pedals around and tried different combinations and order of 3 pedals with different output impedance values.
Verdict: Only the ditto by itself (100ohm out) left the volume of the 32 unchanged. Any other pedal, or combinations including the ditto, boosted the volume by double (subjective). It also made no difference if the pedals were on or off.
Strange. Obviously some gain is occurring in the signal path. I assume you are connecting your FX from the Mother’s rear output jack and not some output point on the Mother’s jack field.
I’ve run mine through a couple of Boss pedals (DS-1, CE-5) and also Strymon Big Sky and Eventide H9 and didn’t notice any significant increase in loudness except where the effect itself increased the gain slightly due to the settings.
[edit]
Silly question, but are you inserting your FX directly between the Mother and the mixer, or using the mixer’s FX send/return bus?
Yep rear output - all TS cables. Significant volume change occurs regardless if pedals are on or off.
Running direct out of the mother, if i bus it in the aux it behaves normally as expected as the mixer is now in charge.
I have used my mother in a few different ways / projects, (that sounds odd) and the volume difference issue just recently started happening. The headphone volume got real low at the same time. My guess is that the fancy impedance circuit that has been put in to drive headphones or line level has gone funky. (There is bit about it on the thread Re: Firmware Patch for Mother-32)
Dave. Yeah that thought occurred to me. The line/headphone out board on the Mother may be driving the output at headphone level for some reason. Might be worth opening the case and checking with a multimeter that the jack connector is working properly.
Well good news all.
Moog tech got in touch and sent me a new “input” board - the small one bolted to the inside bottom of the case, quick swap and problem gone!
Shout out to Moog tech and customer service for their awesomeness.
