Plate Reverb Build: The Result!

Posted on by ftsullivan

Earlier this week I completely finished my plate reverb. The final things that I needed to do after hanging my plate was hooking up all the electronics and testing to make sure they worked. I started off by drilling some holes in the middle of the plate to bolt my transducer directly to the plate. Here are a couple pictures of that process. I ended up using rubber washers for the backside so I could isolate the metal on metal contact as much as possible.

plate1 plate2
plate3

After hooking that up, I had to wire my transducers to some speaker wire. I ended up soldering them together to get a firm connection.

plate4 plate5

After hooking these up, I connected my speaker wire to the 1/4″ mono input jacks, so I could get a signal from the piezo mics. I made sure that I was connecting the right wire to the positive terminal of the 1/4″ jack.

fvdnjfs

After completing all of these tasks, I was done with wiring all my electronics and tested everything to make sure that it worked. To power my transducer, I tried using the headphone amp from my Apogee Quartet to see if it would work. I did get a signal, though it wasn’t as powerful as I wanted it. I made the mistake of not double checking the power requirements of my transducer, and when I hooked up a bigger amp that I thought would work, it ended up blowing the whole thing.

That means that I did not get all the tests and samples that I wanted to get and had to order another transducer that will hopefully get here next week. I did however get one test done and below it shows a dry vocal, one with my plate reverb on it and one with the reverb that I had on in my mix.

That concludes everything that I wanted to get done with this project! I am pretty happy with how everything turned out and I know what I need to do to make a better version in the future. I will have a full analysis of this plate reverb in a couple of weeks when I get my transducer and I find a better amp to power it.

fdff

Plate Reverb Build: Frame Construction

Posted on by ftsullivan

This week, I constructed the entire frame together for my plate reverb. From my needed materials post, you can see that I needed two pieces of 1 1/2″ x 60″ Zinc Plated Slotted Angle and six pieces of 1 1/2″ x 36″ Zinc Plated Slotted Angle to build the entire frame. After picking these up, they needed to be cut to the size that I designed in my blueprint.

However, after inspection of all my parts, I underestimated the length that my eye hooks and links would take up, so I extended my frame by one inch on all sides.

framebuild1 framebuild2

After cutting them to size, I needed to file down the edges that were just cut.

framebuild3

After getting these filed down the best that they could, I started by bolting down the corners through the slots that matched up to create my outside frame.

framebuild4

After getting this complete, I began to make the frame more rigid by adding four joints on the “outside” of the frame (the plate will go on the opposite end).

framebuild5 framebuild6

Here is the frame with the joint support:

framebuld7

After putting everything together, we brought out a square to make sure that all the corners were exactly square. After doing this, we tightened everything down and added support for the corners to make them more stable.

framebuild8 framebuild9

Here is the completed frame:

framebuild10

If the corner supports don’t work as well, I can always take them off and go back to the metal triangles to add rigidness to this frame. Next up, I will be installing the plate to this frame, which you should see done this coming week.