Good morning/afternoon/evening, wherever you may be

In my recently acquired Lord of the Ring, I always had volume problems, ie I had to set the volume to two or three max, otherwise it would be completely deafening. Note that volume control does work, it's just that the base offset is way too high.

Since I added a Pinsound, the problem is amplified, as sound packages are not necessarily normalized, and some sounds are way louder than others. Multiball become extremely loud especially, so I have to set volume to... One. Out of 30.

I can't believe this is a general behaviour of this machine, so now on the hunt to debug the beast.

[EDIT] I should point out that since Pinsound takes over all audio amplification, the only logical explanation is that there is a setting somewhere which affects the volume output, but I can't find it...

Since sound control is working, I'm however rather at a loss to explain why I would have such an offset. I tried to look for sound options in the ROM menu, but could not find any, except maybe a setting called "D'Vol max effect", ranging from 0 to 10, with no noticeable effect. Sidenote: this setting is number 26 in the LOTR specific settings, and oddly enough it is not referenced in the paper manual I have, which is probably for an older ROM.

I would therefore welcome some guidance here, anyone would have any idea ?

Thanks and regards

My Pinsound+ does not have a volume control for speakers. It does have volume control for headphones, and an equalizer, but not speaker (you're not the first to mention this, looks like the original pinsound did ?).

Also, I had the sound issue even before Pinsound.

I messed around with settings and found out that Setting 26 when set to zero disable the "automatic volume increase" for multiballs (and apparently special events/callouts).

It's better now, although it's still very loud.

What is your current volume setting on your LOTR ?

It's OS4

I know as I was planning to upgrade to install the shaker, so I need to update the sound OS (and to do so I need an updated U7 bootrom)

Already did a factory reset

That's really and odd issue

Just a clarification : all of my roms are stock LOTR Roms, ie 10.0, etc

As I was going to install the shaker, I had checked the sound OS revision, but I had not done any change yet

With regards to the resistors I'll test them. What should be their value?

Also, can I measure them directlyon the board, or are they part of a bigger circuit so that any measurement will actually measure the whole circuit impedance?

Regards

I had actually already figured out that setting 26, although different from the manual, when set to zero disable automatic increase of multiball and callout (see one of my previous post)

But that does seem to affect the overall volume, which at a setting of 4 is already as loud as my tron next to it with a setting of 25

Thanks for that! I had never been able to resolve the issue, even with newer OS version, hopefully this will do.

Sidenote, I'm using a Pinsound as well, I hope this fix will apply to me

Just to follow up on this: turns out that firmware update on the Pinsound did resolve the issue, when using Pinsound at least.
So it's likely I had two issues: one which is when using the on board amplifier (and to which the fix suggested by adding resistors would help), and one related to pinsound firmware, both with identical symptoms