Good morning everyone
I know that for high-power amps (100W and more, I suppose) you need to press the black button to “Hi,” but for some reason I like the sound better on “low”. I was wondering what happens if I leave it on “Low” even with high-wattage amps: does it attenuate less or does it burn out?
Hi @JulesDB and welcome to the forum!
It’s totally fine to do this if you want; nothing will burn out. Your amp always sees the reactive load inside the Power Station and that is independent HI/LO switching.
All this switching is doing is tapping off a little bit of signal from the reactive load and feeding it to the PowerStations’s tube power amp. The HI/LO switch controls how much of that signal to tap off. For a low-power amp you want to tap off a bit more than higher-power amps so that you can access the full headroom available.
In your case you are probably enjoying slighly less headroom and earlier breakup of the PowerStation tube amp (if you play at loud-ish volumes).
Thanks so much for your reply. I’m wondering why, though, when I press that button, the volume goes down even when I use the PS-2 as a power amp for my ADA mp1, as if that button also had something to do with the output power.
The level switch is simply an input sensitivity control that changes the input gain and therefore allows you to get the volume control into a more convenient operating range.
That’s why the overall volume changes.
Dave