Abruptly the clicks slowed, but that was only the counter shifting to a new scaling circuit, in which each click stood for 512 of the old ones.

This colloquial name stems from the early days of automatic counting, when a scaling circuit was required to divide down a high count rate to a speed which mechanical counters could register.

In a power scaling circuit, by decreasing just the B+ plate voltage, the cathode bias and screen grid voltage decrease proportionately, while the filament voltage stays constant.

A different approach, using a Variac or a power scaling circuit, reduces the B+ supply voltage available to the power tubes thus producing power tube distortion at a reduced level such that all available output power is sent to the guitar speaker.