Doepfer

Hi psm,
I'm now going to (very likely) display my lack of knowledge when it 
comes to audio engineering terms. (Well they do make life very hard 
by surrounding the whole arena with an aura of mystical terms 
like 'dBm', 'dBV', 'dBv', 'dBu', 'VU' and 'line level' etc., and you 
never, never, ever see these things defined with the appropriate 
mathematical formula given - you have to be 'in the know' (nudge-
nudge, wink-wink). I have a book which _attempts_ to explain, but as 
always, shies away from giving all the maths - if anyone knows of a 
good web resource, to save me working it out from scratch, then I'd 
love to know it!). Here goes:

> symmetrical early on due to noise and started using a high quality 
impedence 
> transformer (reamp box) in front of the assym input instead, so the 
+4db signal 
> from the console gets knocked down to instrument level.  that helps 
alot.

Why do you need to step the signal down at all? Just how big actually 
is it? If by '+4db' you mean '4dBm', then this equates to a couple of 
volts at most, which you could safely stick straight into the 119 
asymmetric input, and thus save having to turn the gain up so much?

> also, seems that by the time i amplify the signal enough to get a 
healthy 
> envelope signal from the a119 the audio on output is really dull.  
maybe 
> there's an adjustment for making the envelope follower more 
sensitive..(??)

Yes, its called the gain control! It seems to me that making the 
signal big enough to drive the envelope circuitry is its main 
purpose! The envelope is developed by precision full-wave rectifying 
the signal, then low pass filtering - by the sound of it, what you 
would ideally want is a second gain stage in front of this so that 
the signal is bumped up high enough for the envelope stage 
independently of the audio out.

Tim