how to adjust gain control on power-amp? (1 Viewer)

[Ted Lee]

hey all -

i have the onkyo m-282 amp. it's curently hooked up to an adcom gtp-500 pre-tuner.

the back of the amp has an input-level adjustment (which i thought was kind of weird ... i would prefer no adjustment at all). according to the manual, they say you should crank it over all the way to max.

now that sounds like a good idea, but i've always been hesitant to "push" any elecronic adjustment (input, bass, treble, volume, whatever) all the way to max. it just seems to stress out the component and degrade the sound.

that being said, whenever i keep the amp at max, i can barely turn up the volume on my pre-tuner (which is kinda of cool, but kind of annoying).

so, after all that, my question is how do you all think i should adjust the amp? right now i have it about 3/4 of the way up.

thx,

ted

 

[John Garcia]

Hey Ted, seems like a long time no see.

There are a few different areas that are all interactive that you may need to mess around with. Obviously, there is the receiver's volume, but you also have the individual speaker gains as well, in addition to the amp's gain. What are your speaker levels set to? If you want more of a range, you can reduce the amp's gain and/or lower the speaker levels internal to the receiver, though if they are at or near zero, I'd go with adjusting the amp's gain down a bit.

I have my monoblocks at about 75% also.

 

[Ted Lee]

howdy john -

yep, i don't hang out at htf too much anymore ... only when i need advice!

ya know ... i think you recommended this amp to me ages ago. can you believe i'm just now getting to it (putting together a 2-channel system ... just for fun).

right now, it's just too difficult to control the volume with the pretuner ... i barely turn it and it gets kinda loud.

i'm not aware of any speaker gain controls (or any other gain controls on the pretuner) ... unless i'm missing something obvious???

in any case, i think i'm going to have to turn the amp gain down to about 50%. i can't forsee that causing any horrible problems ... as long as i don't start pushing the pretuner too hard?

 

[DaveHo]

Normally the gain controls on amps are actually attenuators, so when they are at max, they are essentially out of the signal path & letting the signal pass through unaltered. I used to own a GTP500 as well. I remember the volume control on that being like you are describing, 3 dots & it was blaring, four+ dots would light the clip indicators on my Adcom GFA 535 I had paired with it. Other than the potentially difficult volume adjustment, there's no reason not to max out the gain controls on the Onkyo. Theoretically, the amp should sound it's best that way, but as long as the pots used for the controls are of good quality, it probably won't matter.

-Dave

 

[John Garcia]

Sorry, missed the pre-tuner part. Not familiar with that particular animal