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Pots And Switches...


Thoughtless 7

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Would there be a difference if i say use a no-name brande 500k Pot which costs like £4/$9 instead of a well known 500k Pot which costs like £9/$19? Cos i have a tightish budget and i'm wondering if should should splash out and get the expensive pots and switches or get the lesser known cheaper ones?

Whats your views?

Thanks.

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Would there be a difference if i say use a no-name brande 500k Pot which costs like £4/$9 instead of a well known 500k Pot which costs like £9/$19? Cos i have a tightish budget and i'm wondering if should should splash out and get the expensive pots and switches or get the lesser known cheaper ones?

Whats your views?

Thanks.

As long as it's decently built, I wouldn't worry about it. Plenty of people use cheap pots in guitars - you're not really concerned with keeping the signal absolutely amazingly pure, you just don't want the thing to fall apart after you've been using it for a year.

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FWIW, I use those "cheap" Alpha pots in everything but high-end pro audio equipment, and I've never had a complaint or a problem. They run me about $1.50 from Mouser, or about twice that if I've got to have something odd that Mouser doesn't carry. Even those CGE® pots shouldn't run more than $6.00 or so, or someone is taking advantage. :D

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whoa $19 for a pot?  thats outrageous..

+1

What you should be worried about is how dependable the pot is and if it has smooth rotation. Resistance is resistance, but it should have a good tolerance, +/-20% is the least acceptable, I recommend looking for at least +/- 10% if it's for a linear-taper (eg. Les Paul-type tone controls), it's acceptable for audio taper (eg. volume controls, Strat-type tone controls) because the resistance taper is exponential because doubling or dividing a voltage (the volume) in half (controled by the pot) will only make a difference of plus or minus 3 Decibels; that's why 1 Meg, 500K, and 250K pots don't sound terribly different in terms of volume, tone wise it might, especially on a tone control.

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Dual concentrics are always going to be a lot more expensive, since they cost about three times as much to produce and only sell a small percentage of the the number that a standard pot does. It's simple economics of scale.

Edited by lovekraft
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