Posted by SteveBrown [ 155.188.247.5 ] on July 20, 2006 at 13:47:51:

In Reply to: Balance control posted by Shane on July 18, 2006 at 20:40:59:

I have a similar slight loss in my left ear - a nice present from a business flight while I had a bad head cold. At any rate, I find that if I just bring the left speaker a tad more forward (a couple inches is plenty), it compensates. This eliminates the need for a balance control - and I hate dual volume pots, seems like a real pain to me. Now I will add that I do find a need for a balance pot when I'm playing with new amp designs. This happens when I try to compare one amp with another, they may have different gain, sometimes by a bunch. So I keep on hand a tube pre that I built and it has a balance control. It also has helpful functions like a mono-stereo switch, a mute left/right switch, etc.. What I did was take an old Mac C26 (solid state) and gutted it. Then replaced the guts with tubes - preserving all those great front panel controls (except the tone controls). Works great for experiments, but I find for day to day listening I prefer the simplest possilbe signal path rather than this more complex setup.

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