How Many Boss Buffer Pedals Before You Get Tone Suck?
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- Can you hear the difference between the buffer circuits in these Boss pedals? How many Boss pedals would you use on your pedalboard before using a true bypass switching system?
Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
00:08 - Silicon Buffer
01:01 - JFET Buffer
01:38 - op-amp Buffer
02:28 - What About Output Buffers?
02:47 - Pre-Emphasis De-Emphasis Circuit
04:25 - The Volume Difference From Using Lots Of Buffered Pedals
05:57 - The Tone Difference From Using Lots Of Buffered Pedals
06:50 - Final Thoughts
The most common type of buffer circuit used in Boss pedals is the silicon transistor type buffer and this is the buffer circuit used in most modern Boss pedals. It adds back in some of the treble and presence that is lost from the added capacitance of most standard cable runs, in this case that's 20ft of cable or about 6m.
A JFET type buffer is used in some Boss pedals like the TU-2, TR-2 and later versions of the DD-3. I can't really hear the difference between the sound of this JFET buffer and the more common silicon type buffer circuit.
On some older designs like the SP-1 and DC-2 as well as newer designs like the DD-5 and this CS-3, Boss use an op-amp buffer. This op-amp buffer sounds to me like it adds a little more presence to the sound than the silicon and JFET buffer circuits.
There is a bit more to it than just those three examples though, so far I’ve only been talking about the input buffer on each pedal. There is also an output buffer, which can be different to the input buffer. So even these three types may change slightly in sound because of the type of output buffer used.
The main offenders for really altering the sound in bypass mode are Boss pedals where the bypass signal passes through extra circuitry rather than just the input and output buffers. It’s often called the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis circuit which is basically like a noise reduction circuit for mostly older analog delays, flanges and choruses. Older effects where they wanted to reduce the noise in the circuit, including the original CE-2, DM-2, and DD-2, they all have this kind of circuit in the bypass signal. The DM-2 that I was using here sounded like it was compressing the high end a little.
When you chain a lot of Boss pedals together you'll likely hear the signal level drop a little, the EQ also changes. The more Boss buffer circuits that you have in the signal chain, the more pronounced the change in volume and tone will be.
These are just things to be aware of when you're using a lot of Boss pedals or any pedals that use a buffered bypass. I think the change in tone is pretty subtle when there is only one pedal in the chain. When you're using one Boss buffer pedal at the front of your pedalboard before going through a lot of true bypass pedals and then maybe one at the end, then they're really useful to keep the level strong and prevent you losing treble from a long cable run.
The research I did for this video included a lot of information from this article on Boss buffer pedals which I highly recommend stinkfoot.se/archives/3736 
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I thought this was super interesting. Had no idea Boss used different types of buffers.
Glad you enjoyed. Thanks for commenting!
Same here, I try to get the schematic for any Boss pedals that I own or try out, but never noticed the different types of buffer...assumed they would be generic.
Michael, thank you for your very informative and well done videos about Boss pedals, I truly appreciate them and I really learn from them! You do an excellent job at explaining and presenting! 👍
This was the best video I've seen on the topic! Thanks!
Thanks. Glad it was helpful!
I knew that Boss pedals had buffers, but not even close to the extent you just shared. Thank you very much for this information! It’s greatly appreciated!
Most of my pedal brands are scattered around my boards so this is really never an issue. However, you basically demonstrated how well 8 Boss buffers work together
Love the style, the presentation, everything, cheers
Man your videos are fantastic. Loving to boss emphasis. Super thorough and well done. This one in particular is very helpful.
Thank you! Happy to hear you’ve found them useful
Fantastic video, really happy I found it. I've really been stressing the best way to avoid tone suck. You have save me the headache and cost of adding a true bypass switcher. I appreciate it. The part with the volumes matched in post was particularly enlightening! Hardly a difference to my ears. Put it in a mix and I imagine it's impossible to hear.
Dude, I came here because I added a boss rv-3 pedal to my massive pedal board and it magically solved the disdain I was having for my tone. I already have a really nice empress buffer + so I didn’t expect anything good from it, but it added that little “something,” that was missing. It was a wonderful eureka moment.
This video really outlines why that happened and it does a better job than any pedal video I’ve ever seen. So thank you! You’re awesome man.
Very informative! A buffer or two sounds good and prevents tone suck from long cable runs or pedalboards. But it sounded like all 8 began to induce its own tone suck, sounding overly bright and thin. But eq tweaks at the amp or elsewhere might render all of this moot.
Yeah I agree, I think it's useful to know how these things can change your tone but I'll still probably decide whether or not I need a true bypass switcher in a pedalboard by a case by case basis I think.
@@MichaelBanfieldGuitar Agree with both of you. I have a ludicrous board, with 14 pedals - 8 of 'em Boss and another buffered - and two outboards, and I just dial in my amp to compensate, such as it is. I have fairly long cable runs too, so that's something the buffers help with. Also, I rarely use a "clean" clean tone; I have a JCM2000 with one channel set a bit hotter than Classic and the other one a pushed clean. Modulations (except phaser) and delay into the loop, everything else in front.
What a great video. Thanks for making it, and doing the background research. And you weren't trying to flog pedals in the process...naming no names!
This is a fantastic video. Short and well explained. Good mix of "scientific" AB-ing with some level-headed opinions on the matter.
Thanks, mate. Great, convincing video. From 1982 onwards I was using Boss pedals only culminating in 6 in my Boss plastic handle case, but realised the tone suck at some point and sold most of them, embracing the True Bypass craze in the early 2000. Now I have a mix with a TU-2 first, and soon my vintage CE-2Chorus back on the rig. I do however regret letting my DM-2 Delay pedal go... Also the information is much more available now than 30 years ago. : )
Ain’t it the truth
I realized that they have different buffer tone but didn’t know they can be classified like that.
I don’t like TU-3 buffer tone but I like CS-3. Your video is so helpful and thank you very much!
Very good demonstration, but the "silicon vs JFET" comparison is wrong. JFETs are made of silicon. You're thinking about JFETs vs BJTs (bipolar junction transistors). They do operate on different principles, but silicon is very much present in both.
Great video man, congrats!
Great video once again. In fact I do make use of the buffers of my boss pedals somehow (NS2 send->SD1->DS1->ST2->NS2 return->NS2 out->Marshall RG1->Tuner-> Amp) to get my amp starting to break up, when playing clean, which I rarely do, I just take back some volume on the guitar et voila (Peavey VTX Classic, it's a hybrid with two 6L6 valves in the power section, with the buffers they get working even with lower output pick ups, I use ~
In my experience the difference of boss pedal buffer just affected the the tone when u play in a bedroom level environment, its dont affect tone when the amp cranked into gig level.
In the end boss pedal are good, it so adorable and colorfull thats why i collected 🍻🍻🍻
Great video...this always has been an issue with my board..thanks for explaining it..I have some reconfiguring to do.. I don't always use a few of my Boss pedals for this very reason..
Glad it helped. Thanks for commenting!
Best video ever. Thank you sooo much.
Very interesting. Thanks!
Honestly, if we set up our amp with the pedals inline, then it's done, and few are going to notice thereafter. Probably less of an impact than many revered current digital multi-effect units.
A line of Boss stomps were/are good enough for Prince, Billy Duffy, Robert Smith to name but three. I doubt anyone ever got round to thinking about about tone suck when listening to any of those dudes in full swing
one thing about the pedals with the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis filters in the bypass signal path is that they can make it much easier to clip those pedals in their bypass state if you have relatively high output pickups. the pre-emphasis boosts the important frequencies for the BBD chip, then the de-emphasis is tuned to do exactly the reverse so the output matches the input. the issue is that initial boost can amplify your input signal past what it can handle, so you lose a good amount of headroom even while bypassed.
Great information. Thanks for commenting!
Very good video, thanks!
This is awesome. The tu 2 tuner I never have a problem with through a clean amp. But pushing the gain on my orange or50 I can hear and feel the difference. Ads something I don't like. Thanks for the video very informative.
Glad it was helpful. Thanks for commenting!
Interesting. With the first three it definitely sounded brighter (better) with the buffer engaged but to my ears with the dm2 clip it sounded brighter (better) without the pedal in the loop.
Oh no! Line level loss, if only my amp had a volume knob! Kidding, this was a great demonstration. I love my boss stuff, I try comparing with other brands at the store, then end up leaving with boss too often.
Really great video!
Thank you!
Great video! Thanks 👍
For many years, since I started using these pedals, I always thought it was part of the sound they gave you, I never knew about capacitors or components, and that's how I enjoyed the sound and played.
Great video. I’m 2 years late but would love to see this type of comparison with the dedicated buffers on the market like TCs Bonafide buffer, MXRs CAE etc…
thanks for sharing, peace
Thank you.Sensible and no hype.
Well I have 13 boss pedals on my pedalboard from 80's MIJ to Waza and all in-between and it's fine - better than fine actually.
Bravo Mate
Thank you for making things clear :) perhaps it's just my imagination, but the sound with buffered bypass seems a little bit more compressed also, besides adding more presence
Yes could be, I find it difficult to hear small amounts of compression from recordings sometimes, it's more of a feel thing that I notice when I'm playing. I felt it on the DM-2 buffer but have to say I didn't feel it on the others. You could well be right though.
No, a buffer has zero ability to 'add' compression
Please more about Buffers!
Great video! Just wondering what might the DD200 have and an old SD2 Dual Overdrive? Many thanks
Fascinating
The best tone is guitar cable amp. Nothing can beat that. I always try to keep my pedals as few as possible. Currently only a od3 and a flint. In other bands i play i need that cs3 sound all the time. But in a blues band or something nothings beats hitting the preamp tubes without anything in between.
This is great! I'm curious, do the rules of buffer stacking apply to active pickups (both in electric and acoustic)? I've been experimenting with bypassing the popular floor preamps in favor of the Boss AD2 into a Boss CE, DD8, and RV6 and using an acoustic amp for DI out. I don't perceive a bypassed tone change and assumed an active signal would be less influenced but I also wasn't doing a controlled test.
Hm. Sorry I don't have much experience using active pickups. Hopefully someone else can chime in?
Basically it is similar in principle: all your active electronics already work as a buffer in your guitar and outputs low-impedance signal. And when you plug in your passive pickups into a first buffered pedal in the chain, it does the same - converts your signal to low-impedance. So, after that first pedal there is no difference electronics-wise. And, if you to add many more buffered pedals after that, you will inevitably get some losses in any case, especially with old and simplistic buffer designs like bipolar junction transistor-based buffers in majority of Boss pedals. As you've seen in this video, four stacked buffers do not alter the signal that badly, but with eight you can definitely hear quite a big difference.
You didn't explain how your experiment was set up, so I had to assume that you simply put the pedal in the chain, and bypassed it with a switcher. Otherwise, great video. I could definitely hear a difference between the four/five illustrated. I have heard that the WazaCraft Tuner has an improved buffer, that making it somewhat different from the standard. Might be an interesting comparison.
Good. No demo for the boss fz5?? Fuzz all the way down!? 👍
What if the signal is already conditioned prior to the BOSS pedals, say, by a Pettyjohn preamp?
I'll take the barely perceptible change from the buffered pedals over true bypass all day long. Very cool video.
The old boss stuff had almost a signature tone. Uggh where’d my guitar sound go?
What do you think of the buffers in the Waza series? I tried the BOSS waza Chorus and Delay in a chain, way too much tone suck.
I sold my boss noise gate because of the tone suck which was only noticeable when the amp volume was more than halfway the gamma pedals seem to sound terrible when they’re off
Do you have an opinion on the Waza pedals? they supposedly have improved buffers
Great video, Michael. Is there a website that shows the type of buffer each Boss pedal has? Thanks.
Thanks! I don't know of a site that lists them all but I got a lot of information for this video from a website which covers the same topic that I think I've put a link to in the description. That will be worth a read. Other than that if you can find a schematic for the pedal I'd then ask on a forum if anyone with electronics knowledge can tell you the type of buffer used. Hope that helps.
@@MichaelBanfieldGuitar Thanks Michael.
That's why I add another EQ in my pedalboard, just to volume up.
All pedals engaged seem to slightly remove the low lows and the high highs
MIKE B, which buffers outputs are 250K or 500K? because most guitar amplifiers want to see this impedance 250K or 500K
not sure those buffers only bring back the treble. it seems like it cuts away from the low mids.
i'm using gaming headphones at the moment, and the buffer make it sound worse imho. makes the guitar sound cheaper and hollow.
I'm thinking the same. In the past I couldn't get the Big Muff sound I wanted to. It was too harsh, very scooped, little low end. I switched my Boss DS-1 to be after a Big Muff and it was better. But when I plugged it directly into an amp, I got the sound I wanted. Since then I'm using only true bypass. When I'm losing some of the top end I just turn up a treble a little. It is easier to compensate than low mids lost by buffer.
I could hear treble added definitely with the first 2. With the Compressor...it had a different type of treble effect while muffled....kinda weird honestly.
Does having a DI at the end of chain and one at begining solve this issue by equalizing impendance before and after pedalboard ?
Should do, a DI changes the signal from high impedance to low impedance
One thing I can't figure out: is the buffer (like in boss or ibanez pedals) active and only works when the powered pedal is off or is it always on even when it's on?
Always on
Does digitech x series pedals have buffers?...
Can really hear the op-amp difference on the CS-3 - more full sounding
Excellent video, Michael! I'm rather new to guitars and pedals and this "true vs buffered" bypass thing immediately struck me as a potential source of marketing bs. I'm not ready to pick any sides, yet, but you certainly helped me understand what it is that makes people go bonkers..Thanks!
It really only matters once you get a decent size pedalboard realistically. But the terms are definitely kind of 'buzz words' at this point. Video's very informative!
In my case, it's noght and day. I use a strat, and my Boss TU-2 and CP-1X make it unbearably bright, especially in the bridge pickup.
I had to remove them from the signal chain so I don't pierce my eardrums.
That's because Strats *are* unbearably bright by design...you were just finally hearing it's full output! The Boss buffers are just putting back what your cables are taking away. Just turn your treble down on the amp
Where do the Rv3 and Re20 (90’s versions) fall in the land of Boss buffers? I recently purchase a true bypass relay mod for my TU-2 and have to say the difference is night and day. My buddy came over cause he though his CS-3 was busted and then I showed him this video lol.
Thanks for commenting! I'm afraid I can't help with knowing what type of buffers the RV-3 and RE-20 use though. If you can get hold of a schematic someone on a forum will likely be able to tell you. If in doubt, get it setup in a true bypass looper and switch it in and out while bypassed and see if it's an issue or not.
Whats the point of compression pedal?
💯
whenever i connect a boss tremolo on my board the distortion becomes thinner and brighter
I can't remember what causes that but I remember mods adding level control that remedy that if i recall correctley I never owned a TR-2.
Is that in series with a distortion pedal, or do you route the tremolo through the effects loop?
Um, are you running all those pedals in series? They will ALL have input and output buffers, that always remain on, such that whatever is the first pedal in line is essentially the ONLY buffer you will hear.
Pretty sure he’s using a pedal switcher
Great video, just really wish you used a spectrum analyzer as well to get true, scientific results, not just relying on human ears. While arguably our ears matter more, a lot more knowledge can be inferenced from seeing objectively how these buffers are affecting the signal.
It seems to take the body of the tone away. I do think an always on drive is a good idea when using several pedals
its psychological, you are seeing the pedal highlight go on and off, could you do it with your eyes clothes if your life depended on it?
i'd like to reply to my own comment made earlier. If you are in the room of a pedal rig with say 5 plus boss pedals in chain you do hear a tonesuck, at least i do at home, a roll off of high frequency....through my speakers watching this video i cant hear noticeable difference at all, maybe you can, dont let what you see be a placebo and fool you but, in a real world scenerio you do have to be careful about tonesuck with too many boss's in the chain. Does anyone know how to keep them in a row but fix the problem? will a dedicated buffer before and at the end solve the problem? or other?
Nothing an Ehx LPB-1 couldn't fix.
Just randomly clicked on this video because I wanted to get amused with the truebypass coomer comments. If you ever end up having to decide whether you should compare the differences between buffers in pedals it probably means you have never (and probably will never) record in an actual studio or will record actual music that transcends. You will fail to learn what mastering and sound engineers will tell you: Having any gear whatsoever that slightly modifies the tone and compresses your signal is good because you'll end up with a beefier signal that has a lot of character and this is what most of the records we love to listen have done. (Spoiler alert: buffers don't even modify your signal, they restore it to what it was before, sadly you have troll ears that change the sound before it enters your brain)
To all my fellow strongly anti-buffer pedal enthuasiasts out there, just a friendly reminder: You're not a musician, you're an audio snob and you know it
I reckon 4 boss pedals in a row makes a noticeable difference, to my ear.
PH-2 sucks loads of tone, IME
I didn't hear much of a difference...maybe a little thinner with them all on... Just use a good EQ with boost up front to compensate...
And this is why it feels better to use less pedals as possible.
Fore me the Silicon buffer sound the same like the guitar, jfet buffer sound with more bottom and the op-amp sound with more presence of the hight.
The hights sound more metallic this is something i dont like in Boss pedals
I think they all cut your low end and add compression... I don't like any of them personally..
All sound the same to my ear.
TIP: I use 9-10 boss pedals on a board… stick a cheap EQ, or clean boost at the very end of your pedal chain- it just gives you back those lost decibels .
It can also push a tube amp into breaking up a little more
It’s not just cb you lose
But it could be a good thing
Db*
To be clear, buffers do not really change the sound, they just prevent parasitic low pass filtering due to the impedance of the guitar and cables. To really have a scientific test, you need to use the same cables between amp guitar and pedal. Even then, I would not be worried about buffers, the effects on the signal of buffers are minimal by design. In other words, there is no such thing as too many buffers
Thank you!! So much nonsense about 'buffer compression' in the comments
In my opinion buffers drastically change the sound making it unnatural. Pedals with True Bypass only hit the high end but the thickness of the sound remains the same. Personally I prefer the real Bypass pedals and then I intervene on the tones of the amplifier. And in the case of many true Bypass pedals in the pedalboard, such as seven / eight pedals, just add a transparent boost such as tc electronic spark booster that has the ability to modify high / medium / low and keep it always on.
XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Neither is better and you need a bit of both
News flash, they are all made of silicon.
It would have been great to consult an electrical engineer before making this video. Using a passive pickup with a guitar cable creates a resonant filter that gives the quack/twang of that telecaster. Adding a buffer halfway in that cable length just reduces cable capacitance and shifts the resonant peak upward.
The other important change is input impedance. With 470k, this resonant peak doesn't stick out that much than with the 1M input of a regular tube amp. If you go down to 100k or below, the quack just disappears (the GT1000 has a selectable Rin for this reason!).
Boss buffers are quite transparent, none of the other buffers would have worked any better/worse. If you had tried it with an active pickup, you wouldn't have been able to notice any difference.
By the way, FETs are made of silicon just as bipolar junction transistors that the video wanted to refer to.
6:51 To me it has always sounded with the buffers that it's better - and I'm playing for years now
Mind you, this is also the opinion of Boss: you need buffers to restore the trebly sound of your guitar signal, that's why they build them in.
And I've never got people who think that buffer destroy their sound, while in fact it fixes their sound.
But some like flawed sound with less treble in it, I guess.... Good demo why we need buffers though, imho!
I read that any guitar input impedance should be 1M Ohms or more. But some are as low as 470k. Thats the case of a multieffects pedal guitar input I have. Will my guitar benefit from putting a Boss DS-1 in front of the multieffects in bypass mode to act as a buffer ?