Posted on 04/27/2023 12:30:22 PM PDT by Red Badger
Tech Ping!....................
I believe the next generation of circuits will be optical in there basic nature. We already have optical switches but the current design is far larger than current electrical chips.
One good thing about germanium is it’s lower forward bias voltage drop is less than silicon’s by about half.
Germanium vs Silicon transistors in fuzz-tone pedals has been a long-running debate among guitar players:
“Quick Summary: Germanium fuzz is less harsh, more expensive and gives a vintage sound. Silicon fuzz is harsher with more gain. Silicon fuzz pedals are usually cheaper and easy to mass produce in today’s market because most use modern low cost transistors.
So, this MAY be good news for guitar players! :-D
The coal deposits near Xilinhaote, Inner Mongolia, contain an estimated 1600 tonnes of germanium.
IOW, Red China has the largest deposits.
The difference is probably the Germanium’s lower forward bias voltage drop. Or that it probably creates less harmonic distortion than silicon...........................
Geranium Valley
(Yeah, I know the spelling is different)
But I think that’s how it would go...
Ironically for years the only place you could find germanium was in small signal diodes like the ubiquitous 1N25, and in very high power transmission line rectifiers used by the power companies (where the lower Vbe was significant).
yup
And how much does an eight inch platter of germanium cost?
this would have been nice forty years ago
today
not so much
That small voltage drop is very useful when making crystal radios, or any small signal front end.
The original 60's fuzz pedals (notably the Gibson Fuzz-Tone and the Arbiter Fuzz-Face) used Germanium transistors, and modern builds of those classic circuits still do. Silicon simply does not behave or sound right in those simple circuits. I have a Fuzz-Face that is the best distort pedal I've owned in 60 years of guitar playing. Three Ge transistors, maybe a half-dozen passive components. Simple and beautiful.
More complex circuits benefit from silicon because they typically work with boosted signals, or they're using IC op-amps instead of discrete transistors. But you pay a price in increased noise and diminished clarity.
There's one big problem with Ge-based pedals, though. They misbehave when they get hot, whether in the studio or onstage. The transistors' bias changes as the leakage currents drift, and the pedal gets choppy and can stop working altogether (e.g. read the history of Hendrix and the Fuzz-Face). I learned when playing outdoors to shield my pedal from direct sunlight. But if you manage the temperature, Ge pedals are the best.
Ge transistors will never disappear as long as guitarists are around!
Guitar players love distortion, it just has to be the right kind of distortion.
True, that is how ‘fuzz’ started in the first place, with an amp that had a bad tube......................
You are absolutely right about temperature problems with GE transistors. I had an old portable record player I used to take to record shows to sample the wares. If it sat too long in a hot car, the output dropped to near zero.
A while back, I repaired a vintage germanium-based Japanese fuzz box which had a bad power switch and some wiring problems.
I could never figure out how the thing worked, but what it did was introduce a spike into the waveform (it was not a simple clipper). When fed with a sine wave, the spike only appeared on the downward slope, about 1/3 down from the peak. The eventual buyer described the sound as “fabulous”.
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