September 12, 2005 • Alcorn McBride AmpTraXX User’s Manual • Rev 1.2
Page 4
2. Connect the 9-pin RS-232 cable to both AmpTraXX and your PC. If your dog has eaten this cable, use
a 9-pin female-to-female straight-through (not NULL) RS-232 serial cable.
3. Run the AmpTraXX application.
4. Click on the
button to configure your PC’s serial port. Make sure you select the COM port that
corresponds to the PC port AmpTraXX is connected to. Click OK when you have done so.
5. Now, we are going to establish a live connection with AmpTraXX. Click on the
button to do
this. Once a connection has been established, the application will retrieve the current settings from
AmpTraXX and you will have the ability to adjust its settings in real-time.
6. Assuming that you have not touched anything from the
Let’s make some noise!
section, you should
be able to see the gain sliders and indicators move as you turn the front-panel volume controls. Do this
now.
7. By now, you may have noticed that you cannot manipulate the gain controls with the mouse. This is
because the AmpTraXX front panel is Active and has control of all gain values. To change this
behavior, simply flip DIP switch #1 to the
OFF
(
Up
) position to disable the front panel controls. You
will see the
Front Panel Active
indicator turn off, and the Gain sliders will become available to mouse
control.
8. Click and slowly drag the gain slider for channel #1 up and down and listen to the volume change in
real-time.
9. Now, to demonstrate how to set and adjust filters, let’s configure a Low-pass filter. In the channel #1
division of the
Filter Type
section, click on the
button to select Low-pass filter. The output for
channel #1 will momentarily go silent as the filter is changed. Already, you should notice a difference
in the way the output sounds.
10. To make this Low-pass filter really effective, let’s adjust the cutoff frequency so that only very low
frequency audio is allowed to pass. Click and hold the mouse button on the
Frequency
knob for
channel #1. When you have the mouse button down, the knob can be adjusted by moving the mouse in
an
up
or
down
direction. Adjust the frequency value as close to
100
as possible and then release the
mouse button. You have now selected a cutoff frequency of approximately
100
Hz.
