That's a lot of shaft for such a tiny pot! I have a few and I've never seen them fall apart, like some other 9mm pots I've come across. Standard tolerance, reasonable gang error, but very low power.
That's a lot of shaft for such a tiny pot! I have a few and I've never seen them fall apart, like some other 9mm pots I've come across. Standard tolerance, reasonable gang error, but very low power.
Dual 10kB used as stereo volume pots and no complaints about sound quality. Admittedly that's a small sample size.
I keep a few in the drawer because their small size makes them useful where a loose front panel nut has allowed a pot to tear the tracking from the PCB. They'll replace a larger pot, but with 'leads' to solid PCB tracks.
In terms of pot swapping, I've changed a lot of Sfernice pots which fail and do not repond to cleaning, and various 12mm pots with clamp frames rather than rivets. So I'm talking repairs rather than use in new products or projects. Maybe not a representative sample and more to do with physical qualities than sound quality.
Hi
The 9mm ALPS pots that look similar to the one pictured a few posts back used to be great. AMEK used them in the hundreds of thousands on several of their desks and apart from 1 pot location in 1 desk type which had a minor mechanical 'faux pas' (easily fixed) the only failures where when customers dropped NS10's on them, hardly the pot fault! Over 10 years of CONSTANT daily use (rotation, it was in a training college) yes they got
a bit scratchy. Unfortunately the one pictured a few posts ago will not be an 'ALPS' but a more recent 'copy' so any comparison is questionable. They do however appear in many bits of recent gear, perhaps look at the 'guts' thread on GS for users. Radial I think for one use them or at least a lookalike in their Workhorse modules.
Problem these days is that with 'mergers and acquisitions' you never know exactly what quality you are getting even from a known manufacturer.
Matt S
Matt. Yes, Vishay appear to have bought widely in the industry fairly recently. The old NS10 dropped on the console trick, that made me wince and laugh at the same time! Thanks for brightening my morning!
Hi
As a rough observation, Sfernice, up to around 1988 or thereabouts produced good pots. A while after they were associated with Vishay and there was a period when the pots were not so good, as if they forgot the 'recipe'. They then found it again I think but gear I was associated with at that time had already moved on. Similar things go on elsewhere of course and the problem is getting to the 'real deal' and not necessarily what the label on the front says.
Matt S
Yes, that ALPs pot is now a BI Technologies pot. They sure don't make 'em like they used to. Not like the old Preh pots that were once so popular in large consoles. I still have bags of them, but try persuading a young designer he really wants a 24mm pot with steel screens between gangs!
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