Best KLON Clone?

xHymnal

I've read interviews with Bill Finnegan and he seems convinced that the diodes essential to the tone are super hard to get hold of; but it seems that people can get them on eBay for just a few quid?! Is it all a load of hot air?

juansolo

There are 8000 Klons according to Bill, along with 1000 from the first run of KTRs and probably a good 2000+ new KTRs.

2 diodes per Klon. If you believe he measured them all in the Klons that means there will have been a lot discarded. The KTRs forward voltages that have been measured have allegedly been all over the place, so that practice, if it ever happened, doesn't any more. Also they're glass there will have been breakages.

We're to believe he bought, back in the day, an absolute minimum of 22000 diodes (reality, for the points above would have to be much higher) on the off chance that he'd not be able to get anything else 'essential' and the Klon would actually sell...

They're used for clipping. You can easily get Ge diodes in the same sort of range as the ones that have been measured out of Klons that have been traced. They are nigh on indistinguishable when used this way.

Add to this that the Klon doesn't actually sound very nice with the gain up when it's actually using them so most people use it with the gain backed off a fair way.

Hymnal said:

I've read interviews with Bill Finnegan and he seems convinced that the diodes essential to the tone are super hard to get hold of; but it seems that people can get them on eBay for just a few quid?! Is it all a load of hot air?

It's not the messiah, it's just a ridiculously over hyped OD. It's good. But there's no magic in there and there are certainly things out there these days that I prefer to it.

However it was original in the way it did things so Bill and his team should at least be acknowledged for that. That doesn't make the claims of him not being responsible for the hype any less bullshit. He's ridden the hype train for so many years now, to claim otherwise is a piss take of the highest order.

ThorpyFX

Hymnal said:

I've read interviews with Bill Finnegan and he seems convinced that the diodes essential to the tone are super hard to get hold of; but it seems that people can get them on eBay for just a few quid?! Is it all a load of hot air?

Most people seem to use the Klon as a really good "tone fattener" i.e they roll the gain off and crank the volume. in this scenario the diodes aren't even having an effect on the output because the forward voltage needed to send them into clipping isn't breached.  Even when you do breach the forward voltage and crank the gain up (past 11 o'clock ish) like @juansolo said, its nigh on impossible to distinguish between the types of germanium diodes. Hell I used to built clones with Bat41 schotky diodes because i liked the sound of them..... guess what it sounded like a klon! (i used to have a genuine silver klon when they were available for normal money)

RaymondLin

It's here !