excusing your ignorance, i still look for an answer to the question i asked JoeArthur
If you're waiting on some kind of answer from me, you need to point out the question.
look about 3 or 4 replies up when i asked "how's the gain stage"
You mean the fourth post after my last one? Oh yeah, it's so obvious you meant the question for me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "fuzzy or gainy". I tend to avoid nebulous adjectives used to describe tone.
If you mean the first two gain stages, they are almost identical to the first generation T - the exception being the tie to the new master volume control in a stock second generation that reduces the preamp level when it is wide open.
After those two stages come the treble/bass control network. This has quite an insertion loss which reduces the level out of the second stage - it's what gives the controls their "boost" action.
If you mean the new third stage... well, it's set up for unity gain, meaning a gain of 1. The Mid control setting will boost the gain of this stage for the mid frequency that's selected by the switch. For the frequencies outside the passband of the mid filter, this stage essentially has no additional gain.
I never really modified this third stage as I wanted to keep the mid control. I did remove the tone control between the second and third stage, replacing it with a resistor attenuator to hit the third stage with a higher signal level (but not too high) so it could be overdriven. The mod I did to the mid control to eliminate the boost at zero gave a slight gain to this stage across all frequencies.
The gain could also be boosted with a cathode bypass cap on the second stage. I tried that but for me in combination with the gain from the third stage, it was way too much.
