Some attenuators are resistive, others are reactive, and most of them are passive.
Passive means that the attenuator’s electronics do not require a power supply.
Resistive means that the power out of your amplifier is tamed by the presence of one (or several) resistors within the signal path. The load impedance plays a huge role on the sound, and a resistive attenuator will make the tone somewhat darker with loss in the high and low frequencies content of the audio signal.
Reactive means that reactive elements (transformers, coils and/or capacitors) are used instead of mere resistors. With this technology, the damping factor will decrease with the level of attenuation. Most of the time, a reactive attenuator results in loss of character and fidelity, a ”muddy" sound and other unwanted effects.
Another downside of passive/resistive/reactive attenuators is the way the listening level is controlled - usually by a stepped potentiometer which does not allow for precise volume setting and limits you to a set of fixed attenuation levels.
RE-ACT™ stands for "Reactive-Active Attenuator", which means it uses a reactive load and active overall schematics. In effect, the RE-ACT™ can be described as the combination of two elements: a reactive loadbox inherited from the critically acclaimed Torpedo Live series, followed by an ultra-low-distortion, wide-band, low-noise solid-state amplifier based on a widely used HiFi architecture.
The role of this system is to present a speaker-like impedance to your amplifier, dissipate the power, then re-amplify it to the desired volume. This design offers a number of advantages over resistive/passive ones:
- The amp is always connected to a fixed impedance, which is as close as possible to a real speaker impedance
- As the impedance does not change with the attenuation, the tone of your amp stays the same
- The volume you hear in the room can be set continuously resulting in REAL master-volume control (SPEAKER parameter) after your amplifier’s master volume
- The speaker-output impedance of your amplifier is independent from the speaker impedance of the actual speaker cabinet you plug into the Torpedo Reload. This opens up a a world of creative possibilities when it comes to cabinet mixing
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