Similar boat for me, finishing off Wonkavator multiball is definitely challenging. The most frustrating part is if you fail to finish it, it takes a while to re-qualify and feels like chopping wood.
However, I enjoy pure imagination less than the most secret machine.
I got 14 gobstoppers on the most secret machine yesterday, what's your record?

External sub helped a bit but those backbox speakers are still tinny as hell. It’s still missing mids. Noise cancelling headphones in the headphone Jack sounds wonderful though.

I have a Pinwoofer in mine and it made a world of difference. The addition of the tweeters with the sub make it night and day. Clear mids and bass that you can dial in per the amp. Definitely worth the investment for Wonka in my opinion.

After 900 games, the only time I got that fifth ticket was when I reached Pure Imagination. Never before, and not since. Good luck!\

A lot of subs have controls for that vs. having to get an add on adapter..

Also expensive, Charlie or Veruca Kid MB without making their shots.
Requalifying them requires completing the blue factory modes and starting them again.

The most important thing to do in Wonka is make sure you get your kid shots during every Kid MB.

Hmm I do not know if I am doing this, could you please explain how to whack each one? Is it just the qualifiing shot to get the individual jackpots? Like Blue for Mike Teavee under TV, Charlie the spinner, gum targets then I am a bit lost.

Thanks

John

I do know sometimes I hit the kid multiball target and get super jackpot and it sounds big and cool but no idea how much it is worth since I can't look up with a play field full of balls.

Holy crap 14 is big I am at like 9! Not even double digits. Seems easy for me to sink them when the hole is moving then stationary? You?? Is is after 3 it starts moving?

No, it was detailed earlier in the thread and my YouTube vids.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/wwcf-club-wonka-golden-tickets-inside/page/237#post-7013374

I think after 3 it pivots back and forth about 90°, then after another 3 it starts rotating all the way around. Then another 3 after that it starts from stationary again and repeats.

The big key for me is holding a ball on the right flipper while in sudden death and just getting in the gobstopper with the left flipper.

Another thing that helps is to peg the captive ball when it is lit for more time, as well as hitting other shots to increase point values for the gobstopper hole. I think yesterday I collected at least 14 million on this mode. It can be super valuable!

What sub do you have? It might have crossovers on it that do exactly what you are wanting to do.

Just running a wire from Wonka’s cab sub to an external bass doesn’t do the trick (like it usually does with most pins) even when tweaking the low pass / frequencies on the ex sub, something about how Wonka’s audio was done is just crazy thin.
For my use it sounds great now after the adapter to ex sub, if someone wants to go all out with the most options and more $$ then of course a Pinwoofer overhaul will provide that, just didn’t seem necessary for me.
As for the headphone jack mine sounds completely void of bass I can’t play it with my Bose headphones, compare playing Pirates with headphones to Wonka with headphones and Wonka’s is unbelievably thin.

I've seen a cutover filter on subs but only within their range so usually 120hz or below, it does not mean that what's higher is filtered as the sub in is often coming from an amplifier that filters the output.

Right, you dont want the sub handling anything higher than 120. 120 is high for a sub anyways.

For subs connected to an amp or receiver, you would choose which source to do the filtering, not both. So subs with crossovers, they are used when there is no amp or receiver to perform the function.

That doesnt seem to make any sense...

It sure doesn’t but for whatever reason this is the case on Wonka

deleted. I read the above discrepancy as something else.

An opto. Check for loose or broken wires, opto not seated tight, reseat it's connector.

LTG : ) Former jjp something or other.

I totally agree. In the settings you can sample other sounds and they sound very full and crisp. For whatever reason the gameplay sound is poo

Interesting, obviously results vary, but for me a speaker wire clipped on the Wonka crappy sub to a $15 Goodwill special powered sub (with adjustable crossover) sounds great for the low end. Midrange still sucks, but is acceptable for a pinball machine.

You guys have me curious about upgrading the sound system now.

If you've ever used headphones on Wonka it's very good to my ear. But I do hear a little thin-ness and occasional crackle through the speakers.

I can't recommend the PinWoofer DIY kit (with tweeters) enough. Cleanest install and night and day improvement. I didn't replace the factory sub and still wouldn't. https://pinwoofer.com/pinwoofer-jjp-diy-amplifier/

Thanks for the audio tips. I’m going to go with Pinwoofer. $400 with the mounting base isn’t cheap, but when we are talking $10K+ machines, what’s another 4 bills for killer audio? I’ll share my results in a couple weeks after install.

Please do. I’m finally joining Wonka club today as I have a scheduled freight company coming to my house from 7-2pm pst today.

You feel like a kid again waiting for this to happen, but what an expensive toy it is. Very fortunate I can afford these games.

I've always felt Wonka's flippers were juuuuust strong enough to make the shots. I (and apparently everyone) feel like a lot of JJP games are like this. So just out of curiosity I bumped up the flipper power by two points.

Just two points.

Holy crap.

I'm not exaggerating when I say it feels like a different game. It shoots sooo much better. I'm kicking myself in the butt for not toying with it earlier. If you haven't already, I urge you to at least try it. Bravely move past the "Don't touch these coil settings or your machine will burst into flames" warning. It's like a Wonka Cheat Code. But with no cheating.

Yes, done it too! Like the play, watch out for the right ramp, ball will fly out more often (without a plastic or my candy-wire I made for it)

I have this at home but havent installed yet. Might need to do that Soon...

Thats interesting. I certainly dont have that problem with the stock settings. Never had a problem with the flipper power on my JJP games. Lucky me I guess

I agree completely. I have l33tsandman on Twitch to thank for that - I resisted changing the flippers for a long time until he pointed out on one of my streams that I was making the shots accurately but not making the ramps through no fault of my own.

I bumped them to +2 (left the top ones alone) and it made things so much better. Especially when the magnets are going nuts, that really seemed to pull down the flipper power.

Check the black gear, it might be loose (2 set screws in it to tighten).

If you don’t mind, what do you have your Pinwoofer amp dials set to? And did you change any of the menu sound settings? I have a problem with constantly tinkering with things and have been messing with my dials for about a month to get it just perfect.

Here’s my current settings with the gain dial set to 2 o’clock. I didn’t change any system settings and try to keep the volume range between 20 - 30.

FCCA05C3-DD97-44C4-9217-0644788B97A6 (resized).jpeg

Very little success on getting past one golden ticket. I recently changed one position easier than medium the last month. However most plays are now going to Toy Story.

You should reach out to Pinwoofer. When I bought the DIY kit, they sent me suggested settings for these...

This is the link they sent. Hope it helps...

https://pinwoofer.com/blog/pinwoofer-jersey-jack-pinball-willy-wonka-and-the-chocolate-factory-amplifier-settings/

We didn't get a second golden ticket for like a year. Wonka is the gift that keeps on giving.

Greetings phill2cb ! The link provided by Rager170 was the correct one for basic settings. However, considering your comments, it might help if you gave me a quick call. I'm sure there are some simple things we can do to break you lose.

Thanks,

Dan
https://PinWoofer.com
[email protected]
+1 208-855-0346, 9am - 5pm MST, Mon - Fri

Wonka LE #1026 reporting to play!! Just arrived and finally took a moment to setup the unit real quick. I wonder how many total LE’s have been produced?

A few simple issues required adjustments, but gotta ask something:

1) putting back in the playfield is actually rather difficult to align the metal hooks back in the slot. Is that normal? I cannot tell what could be causing it to be tough..

Now that people have been saying TS4 sounds like a slot machine, I kinda hear that in Wonka. I’m trying to understand the noises based on what I’m hitting… not seeing it right now, but then again I just got the game.

Grease on the metal where it slides and a dab where it locks in place.

LTG : )

Oh, my build date is 12/2021.

What do you know… they actually put the neoprene washers under the posts. I think that is preventing pooling… I will be inspecting this over time.

F9D5D33D-8A44-4148-A47A-CBA7175BB7C3 (resized).jpeg

The worst damage is my back box. Check out this!! I contacted my distro today and let’s see what JJP says.

We all know wood will continue to split over time if there is a crack present. Not sure if anyone has dealt with this.

Even the alignment of the frame of the back of the back box is off. Very strange to me.

Crossing fingers it get sorted smoothly.

51E3B1BF-06B5-401A-AB7D-7B293CF2B1DC (resized).jpeg

5CF87C1F-0F8A-4E6A-AE62-425D97003D72 (resized).jpeg

Huh… okay I’ll give that a go and see how that goes.

Thanks!!

This'll be a bit of a long one, since Wonka has become my favorite game over the last couple years, and audio production is pretty much the thing I have spent most of my life doing, now. I've got something close to 25 years of music performance, audio engineering, audio mastering, and critical listening under my belt, for whatever that is worth in analyzing what I hear going on with Wonka. So, temper any readings of my frustrations that might be apparent in this post (I still love the game and I appreciate everyone that worked on it!). But, I've always found the audio system to be the weakest part of the experience.

I also picked up a PinWoofer JJP Super Kit for my LE a couple months ago. It took me just a couple hours following the instructions to install with no significant issues or challenges working slowly through it. I think the price and effort were entirely worth it for giving me a cleanly packaged system with a lot more control of the overall audio performance of the game than the factory setup. However, the issues with Wonka are deep enough that Pinwoofer as it is designed isn't going to be able to fix everything to my ideal results. I could imagine a theoretical Pinwoofer amp upgrade that gave us a few fully parametric bands of equalization, separated for the cabinet speaker vs. backbox speakers, allowing someone to tweak things in a little better (but probably jacking up the cost a good bit and burying most people in way too many knobs that it'd take a decent understanding of equalization to put to use while not making the machine sound even worse), but the real issues for me beyond the things that Pinwoofer improves (the speakers/amp) are in the samples and audio playback/mixing code in the game where no amp/eq/speakers can fix them. Also, the Pinwoofer system doesn't prevent the few loud startup/shutdown pops in audio - it actually kinda makes them louder (but they sound fuller/nicer) depending on how much the amp is turned up. Still, for anyone that isn't too concerned by the price that wants a self contained clean way to step up the audio a bit, I think Pinwoofer is a good option. I considered doing something more DIY, have tried hooking up subs and studio monitors to my Wonka, and I like the Pinwoofer solution better than those approaches for myself (studio monitors don't sound/feel like a pinball machine and made all the issues in the audio mixing more obvious, and the external sub didn't help with the harsh factory backbox tweeters).

I've attached pictures of how I currently have my Pinwoofer amp and in-game Sound Settings configured. Note, these are largely subjective and will vary significantly from space to space (I'm in a carpeted living room that is really quiet and dead sounding, for reference).

For some more thoughts on what I think could be improved about Wonka's audio, I'm going to dive a bit deeper into my own attempts at understanding what is going on with the audio playback/mixing code and the samples that the system is playing.

In the System Settings, JJP give us control over the following Sound Channels:
Music - Contains mostly what you would expect (all the background music comes from this channel), but the volume of this channel varies wildly with certain musical sounds really jumping out and others being pretty laid back. Also, it seems the audio code is designed to apply significant ducking/compression to this channel (in fact, all channels except Speech) based on sounds activating on other channel(s?). This gets really annoying if you try reducing other audio channel volumes in settings. The reduction in level of the main Music channel still occurs, even when everything else is turned completely down, and it does not seem to be scaled with the actual level of other sounds. I understand that attempting to make sure the callouts are audible in what might be a noisey arcade through the relatively weak factory speakers and amp in this game would be a challenge, and I get that this is probably an attempt to deal with that. But, if I were designing this myself, I'd have preferred to see smarter audio mixing code that takes into account the average/peak level of other channels after their mixer level in settings to apply any ducking/compression and would have wanted to level out the amplitude and frequency response of this track to avoid needing such drastic measures. If adding this kind of extreme audio ducking feature, I'd have wanted to add a few options in settings to control its overall effect or disable it.

Speech - Contains the game announcer, voice clips of kids/wonka/etc from the movie. Volume level is mostly pretty even across these callouts, but frequency response is all over the place. A lot of clips from the movie suffer from some harsh upper mid and high frequencies and often a hint of clipping. Conversely, the announcer is very clean and has lots of low mids in the voice recording. Any attempt to reduce high frequency overall with something like the Pinwoofer EQ to help with harshness makes the announcer sound a bit muffled and highlights the thick low mid frequencies. Any attempt to add low mids to help the thinness of lots of the movie audio clips ends up making the low mid boominess of the announcer excessive.

Fanfare - Contains sounds like the cymbal crash and rising notes at end of ball, computer award collect noise, gobstopper ball lock, short orchestral stabs in lots of modes that signify hitting the right shots / making progress. This channel also has the audio compression/ducking issue present in the Music channel. Again, the amount of volume reduction is extreme and it happens even if other channels are turned down.

FX - Incidental sound effects, ball launch sound, also lots of orchestral stabs for making shots that maybe aren't directly mode related - seems like maybe some of what could have been put into Fanfare is instead (or also?) in the FX channel. This channel also has wildly varying volume level like Music and Fanfare based on audio mixing code.

I've been psyching myself up to take a look at unpacking the full game update iso to see if I could unzip the individual partition images to find the audio samples, and test replacing a few then rezipping the image to see if the game will load it (not sure if there are checksums or other things in place to prevent users from tampering at this level). If it'd be possible to re-source and master them myself, it could be worth the effort over time. I've got the 4kHDR Blu Ray of WW, and have a feeling I might be able to get nicer source audio and put in the effort to level out some of the variations in frequency response and amplitude for things like callouts and all with the set of tools I have available to me. That STILL wouldn't resolve the issue with the reactive audio mixing in game (unless things are more open than I expect and I could get a chance to tinker with that code as well - I do have a good bit of audio programming experience).

Anyway, that's a whole lot of words, and thanks for anyone that got this far in reading what is effectively a big rant, so I will see myself out for now

Wonka Pinwoofer Setting.jpeg

WonkaSoundSetting.jpeg

Duplicate

It turned out the settings I finally landed on as my favorites were NOT very similar to the PinWoofer-offered starting recommendations. I also turned the sound effects way down and the music way up in the game menu settings to suit my taste (but left callout volume at default). Can't go wrong - dial it in how you like it!