BeeQuiet

[John EH]

Hello all.......Long time I haven't played around tweaking my gear, just listening to it.  Today got an email from Bottlehead.com and decided to take a look around.

I noticed the Bee Quiet attenuators and have a question.  I have an Extended Foreplay III that I love but the right and left volume kit attenuators are mega noisy. 

Can the Bee Quiet be used to replace them and if so do we have a wiring diagram for it?  Probably can figure it out easy enough but I've been out of it for awhile.

John

 

[debk]

Why don't you just get a pair of Goldpoint stepped attenuators.  I have them in my FP III and they work great

Debra

 

[caffeinator]

There's another tweak you can try to quiet them down.

IIRC, you can open the back of the rotary switch.  Be careful, there's a spring and a couple of detent balls (about the size of BB's) inside.  You can cut a couple of coils off of the spring to reduce the pressure on the balls, which makes the switch action quieter.

This worked on the old sweetest whispers, and I think it was the same switches on the FPIII.

 

[Paul Birkeland]

The Bee Quiet could function in the Extended Foreplay III, but you would have to figure out the switch mounting and modify the layout a bit.

A diagram isn't super necessary, there's just input, output, and ground, not the end of the world.

 

[corndog71]

There's another tweak you can try to quiet them down.

IIRC, you can open the back of the rotary switch.  Be careful, there's a spring and a couple of detent balls (about the size of BB's) inside.  You can cut a couple of coils off of the spring to reduce the pressure on the balls, which makes the switch action quieter.

This worked on the old sweetest whispers, and I think it was the same switches on the FPIII.

I did that with my old Foreplay 2 and it was such a pain I went and bought PEC pots and never looked back.

 

[Doc B]

I don't usually butt in on this kind of thing. But we spent a lot of time last year trying a lot of different volume controls, and found that they influenced the sound waaaay more than we thought possible. As character flawed as the sweetest whispers was in terms of potentially noisy switches and coarse steps, it always sounded better - tighter and thus deeper sounding bass, better resolution, cleaner treble - than the pots we would try. And it inspired the BeeQuiet, in which we accepted that it will be a bit more expensive to take out those last sticky issues and thus added more expensive parts and more complexity, and which I like better than anything else I have tried so far.

SW certainly wasn't perfect, and we made an effort to explain why it was compromised in terms of parts quality so that we could design it to hit a price point. Last year's experiments in looking for an all out volume control put it ahead of all pots we tried with the closest runner up being an Alps Blue that we aren't even sure was a legitimate one. And SW came out ahead of other stepped attenuators we tried too. So it may not be the most convenient thing to open up a noisy switch and futz with it. And you may find that an Alps Blue or Goldpoint or whatever sounds better to you. They are really nice! But my experience indicates that it might be worth it to try getting the SW back up to snuff first.

 

[Grainger49]

John, welcome back! 

Deb, what happened to the rocket?

 

[debk]

I changed my avatar to show my support for marriage equality!

 

[sl-15]

i think it is worth trying to fix the Sweetest Whispers. i have done this myself a while back and mine are still working flawless. i posted some instructions on how i got rid of the noise/scratchiness:

http://www.bottlehead.com/smf/index.php/topic,557.msg3523.html#msg3523

good luck