I submitted a question to tech support on this but figured I would try here while i was waiting. I just purchased a new B-stock Sub phatty and it works great as far as I can tell. Last night was the first time I tried using it with headphones though and I’m getting no sound out of it. I’m using my 1964 Ears In-Ear monitors hooked up to a 1/8" to 1/4" adapter (both of these work on my other gear). Is there some setting I’m missing that turns on the headphone jack?
I do think I have an older model (#1228), so it probably doesn’t have the newest firmware and all that. Any advice???
headphone amp could very well be blown…just takes one little OP amp chip to fry. often ppl take a patch lead thats mono and plug it into the stereo headphone plug and it can fry the amp. or they take the headphone out and plug it back into the filter input on the synth, and crank until it distorts and “sounds phat man”… which creates a massive impedance mis-match and can burn out the headphone amp as well…
Thanks for the reply. I tried with a bunch of different headphones and adapters last night so definitely seems like something is messed up in there. I will probably just end up returning it since I just bought it…might be easier than sending it to Moog to mess with. Bummer! Hopefully the store has another I can just swap with but since it was B-Stock they may not.
It could be an obvious answer, but I got caught several times in the beginning
Headphone volume is “linked” to the main volume, so if you set the main volume to 0 (in my case i wanted to mute the sound going to the monitor and only use the headphone), you will have no sound on your headphone, whatever the headphone volume setting.
In the manual :
HEADPHONES VOLUME
This control balances the level of the headphones jack with the main VOLUME setting. If you change the level of the main VOLUME knob, you will hear a similar change in the headphones volume.
yeah, I tried that too…even with the main volume and headphone volume all the way up I don’t get any sound. I am a major newbie though so if there is some other setting that could fix it please fill me in!
I should also mention nothing has been plugged into the headphone jack except for headphones. Waiting on the store I bought it from to let me know about return but still hoping someone here will have a simple fix I’m missing…
Hi Blackout,
I’ve heard people say that could happen on a Voyager, but I think that the Sub 37’s headphone amp is truly mono and that the Left and Right sides of the headphone jack are simply wired together. (I don’t have confirmation on this yet, but it’s hard to imagine that they’d design separate L/R headphone amps for an audio source that’s always mono.)
Talking of this - on the Sub 37 has anyone noticed a creeping noise only on the headphone out? I was on the sofa with it the other day so first time I’ used the headphone jack and it was ok at first then after ten minutes there was more and more distortion noise creeping in (no it wasn’t the patch/feedback/multidrive lol). I moved to the main output while this was happening and that was clear!! back on the headphones there it was (it wasn’t the phones either my AKG 240s have seen lots of reliable service). Anyway eventually even not playing a note there was this noise, tried pluggin in and out and still there. Eventually I turned up the mixer knobs/multidrive etc to get it go louder and that cleared it. I just worry if it’s the start of a failing op-amp because I had a very similar sound on the outputs of an old roland once that I traced to that (in that case quite easy to repair with through hole chips - but SMT on this baby won’t be something we could fix in years to come very easily I guess)..
Just an update that I am returning the Sub Phatty…Rock N Roll Vintage (SynthCity) in chicago has been awesome to deal with and are sending me a new one in exchange. thanks for all the advice!
Subber…being an electronics engineer, my first thought was “ok well the headphones impedance is changing over time, or the headphones just have a high impedance that the Op amp is not used to, or ideally designed to handle and the high headphone impedance is causing the bias on the amp to become skewed and the gain slowly changes, creeping the noise up”…
have you tried another headphone brand/model? also if you unplug the headphones, turn off and back on Sub37, and then plug the phones back in, does the problem “reset” and the noise slowly start creeping up again?
I’ve noticed a similar problem with my sub 37. The headphone output gradually distorts until there’s a quiet crackle. If I switch the synth off for a couple of minutes and then turn it back on again it seems ok for a while but the problem occurs again at higher volumes. Should I report this issue to customer support? I bought my sub 37 in November last year so it’s getting close to the end of its warranty.
