Hot Plate Power Attenuator
The Hot Plate power attenuator was first released by THD in 1994. It was designed to act as a type of master volume control for tube-based amplifiers, without sacrificing the distorted sounds such amplifiers make when they are played at full volume. The concept started in the late 1980s as a way to in-house test the company’s amplifiers without the technicians’ suffering hearing loss.
The Hot Plate works by being installed between the amplifier and the speaker cabinet (if any is used), absorbing the majority of the signal from the amplifier and passing only a small amount to the speaker. The remaining power is converted to heat. The UniValve and BiValve-30 amplifiers have Hot Plates built into them; the Flexi-50 has a foot-switchable master volume control in lieu of a Hot Plate. The Hot Plate is manufactured in five different colors; each color corresponds to the specific amplifier impedance that the Hot Plate is optimized for (the impedances should be matched.) The colors and impedances are: gold- 2 ohms, green- 2.7 ohms, red- 4 ohms, purple- 8 ohms, and blue- 16 ohms.
The Hot Plate has a Line Out jack, which can be used to send a DI signal to the mixer, or to insert equalization, time effects, and possibly a solid-state amplifier between the distorting tube power amp and the guitar speaker. The Line Out (or DI) signal can be blended with a miked guitar speaker at the mixing console. The Load setting enables using the Hot Plate as a pure dummy load, with no guitar speaker.
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