tube pedal board buffer

[ERB]

Oh yeah, that's right, I haven't modded my TD-1. I took the diodes out of my TO-2. It has bass and treble controls, which I do need to dial back to get a natural tone.

I have a DOD Bifet preamp that is not true bypass and I love the sound of its buffer. I think my guitar sounds better with it than without it, but your mileage will, no doubt, vary.

I think really about the best you can hope for is consistency of tone. Even if all your effects were true bypass you'd still alter your tone from all that loading business. AND, as I've discovered, some effects, even very high quality ones, are just doggone bright. There's nothing worse (to me) than going from a dark bypassed, unbuffered sound to a too bright effected sound. Better to be buffered all the time. Then, while your sound will always be on the bright side, at least you can compensate (to some degree) with your amp's tone controls.

I have to agree with Howdy 100% here. Bravo, dude!

[R.G.]

I really don't think it's so much that the buffers are "bright" (any op-amp or transistor buffer fundamentally has a low-pass response), it's that they transform the impedence, either by presenting a higher input impedence to the guitar and/or presenting a lower output impedence to the amplifier, creating a brighter signal. But any decent buffer is itself quite transparent in terms of its voltage transfer characteristic.

You're right, but I think your correctness is wasted. Once a person determines as an artistic position that "solid state is bad, pedals are junk, my tone is being corrupted" it's very difficult for them to be objective. The only real hope is to make them do blind testing, and even then it gets dicey.

This is complicated by the fact that many buffers are less than well designed. While that's true, it's not difficult, as you know, to design one that is essentially an impedance converter, making the same signal able to drive cables without loss. This restores the guitar to what it would have done without cable loading, but it makes the true-tube-believers say "too brittle" automatically, even if they've been complaining about loss of "tone" in their setups. "Loss of tone" is most closely translatable as "treble loss from loading". But sometimes it can be used as "brown sound" or "vintage sound" if they're trying to be complimentary.

The fact is, once a person decides only a tube will do, only a tube WILL do. They will actually hear other alternatives as worse somehow, in a poorly quantifiable way. It's not that they're being obstinate, just that their brain is interpreting things below their conscious layers of thought. They think it will sound worse, so it does. And there can be no argument about whether it really does sound worse to them or not - it does.

The other side is that the favored approach will sound indefinably better. If sound through a tube is the only thing that sounds good, then sound through any tube will sound better.

This is a trap the human brain seems to build for itself. Many fortunes have been made in the hifi/stereo world based on this. The subjectivist underground has almost made itself into the majority this way.