TC has done it again....

[hammerheadmusicman]

[...] I personally would never buy their modulation effects. They sound soulless to me, and they are probably completely digital. [...]

They still make the SCF Stereo Chorus Flanger, it's still analogue (MN3007, NE570) and good enough for Eric Johnson for example...
Many consider this the best chorus pedal ever.

I read an interview with EJ, and he was claiming to be able to her the difference in tone between different brands of 9v battery.

[kothoma]

[...] I personally would never buy their modulation effects. They sound soulless to me, and they are probably completely digital. [...]

They still make the SCF Stereo Chorus Flanger, it's still analogue (MN3007, NE570) and good enough for Eric Johnson for example...
Many consider this the best chorus pedal ever.

I read an interview with EJ, and he was claiming to be able to her the difference in tone between different brands of 9v battery.

(BTW The SCF is running on mains and 15V internally.)

[hammerheadmusicman]

I wasn't talking about that specific pedal, I just thought that battery brand thing is a bold statement to make! A weird one too!

[kothoma]

I wasn't talking about that specific pedal, I just thought that battery brand thing is a bold statement to make! A weird one too!

Didn't assume anything else. Just wanted to put in some trivia.
Yes, strong claim. Did he pass a double-blind experiment?

Edit: I bet he even hears which guitar tech put it in.

[DutchMF]

I wasn't talking about that specific pedal, I just thought that battery brand thing is a bold statement to make! A weird one too!

Didn't assume anything else. Just wanted to put in some trivia.
Yes, strong claim. Did he pass a double-blind experiment?

What I've heard is he is deaf as a really, really deaf thing as well, from standing in front of amps on 11 in the studio, finding that elusive 'golden tone' ...... So good luck to him picking out the Duracells 

Paul

[RobA]

Rob - don't waste a good one on me, one of the ones with a backwards pot will do me just fine

I know that 'digital' comment would bite me in the butt, exactly what Dave said 'jack of all trades, master of none' maybe the tiniest bit sterile.. But not nasty, yet sound very good. Like I said, super versatile, and robust too.

TC do put a lot of thought in 'the little things' too. For example the back is held on by one big captive screw, which you can undo with a guitar pick or coin. Genius!

Also, the bypass is changeable, little dip switches inside, to allow you to change between buffered bypass and true bypass, and for the delay tails/no tails etc..

Unfortunately there is a big plate inside, and I don't have any torx tools with me.

If you want me to send you the "bad" one, PM me your address and I'll send it. If you aren't going to be able to do anything with it for a couple of weeks, you may as well wait for the new layout. It actually does just feel wrong to me to have it backwards. Of course, it is possible to just wire the pot the right way and ignore my numbers, but still, it's the kinda thing that should be right.

It figures they'd cover up the internals, bastards. Actually, it makes sense and I like what they've done there.

So, what you don't like about the pedal is a lack of character? I can understand that.

[RobA]

if you want my opinion, i think this mini HOF is cool for the size, nothing more. i had a hall of fame and i think is sounds good, but not astonishing. TC pedals are good if you are not a tone slut. digital sounds fake to me, and there's nothing we can do about it. their flanger and their vibrato sounds like a joke. a lexicon pcm80 is way more beautiful than these pedals. btw i have a nice tube reverb in my amp, and that's all i need at home.
for my big rig i bought a lexicon, and half of my modulation pedals are useless now (almost).
TC delays like nova delay and nova repeater are great though.

I'm a bit confused. As far as I know, the Lexicon PCM80 is digital and it doesn't have particularly good specs in the CODEC and DSP processor departments either. Make take on the Lexicon stuff is that it's all in their programmers. They write really good algorithms.

[RobA]

[...]
I have the Alter Ego (the PGS branded version of the Flashback) and used to have the Vortex. The flanger didn't really do much for me. But I do like Flashback quite a bit, especially the 2290 mode and the Dynamic mode. For emulating analog delay, the Hardwire DL8 is much better than the TC. The DL8 is a very under-rated prodcut, in my opinion.

And speaking of Lexicon, I've read that the DL-8 uses Lexicon algorithms. I've got one and find it quite good.

[hammerheadmusicman]

I wasn't talking about that specific pedal, I just thought that battery brand thing is a bold statement to make! A weird one too!

Didn't assume anything else. Just wanted to put in some trivia.
Yes, strong claim. Did he pass a double-blind experiment?

Edit: I bet he even hears which guitar tech put it in.

Haha! "This fuzz sounds shit today, I bet john put the batteries in!"

[hammerheadmusicman]

Rob - don't waste a good one on me, one of the ones with a backwards pot will do me just fine

I know that 'digital' comment would bite me in the butt, exactly what Dave said 'jack of all trades, master of none' maybe the tiniest bit sterile.. But not nasty, yet sound very good. Like I said, super versatile, and robust too.

TC do put a lot of thought in 'the little things' too. For example the back is held on by one big captive screw, which you can undo with a guitar pick or coin. Genius!

Also, the bypass is changeable, little dip switches inside, to allow you to change between buffered bypass and true bypass, and for the delay tails/no tails etc..

Unfortunately there is a big plate inside, and I don't have any torx tools with me.

It figures they'd cover up the internals, bastards. Actually, it makes sense and I like what they've done there.

So, what you don't like about the pedal is a lack of character? I can understand that.

It's better than them gooping it up, cause you can take the plate off I think, with torx screwdrivers, which average joe probably doesn't have.

Maybe 'lack of character', but Dave said it best with 'jack of all trades/master of none'.

[RobA]

I can actually believe that in certain effects, you could probably hear the difference between a lithium battery  and an alkaline battery. But, I'd say that was a problem with the design of the power supply section of the effect.

One little dig at analog from me here, in a certain way BBD based effects are really just very bad digital. Technically, they are discrete-time analog. But, the discrete-time is really bad and their frequency response is crap because of it. On top of that, using 32bit CODEC's pretty much renders the difference between the the analog voltage levels in the BBD's and the samples in the DSP meaningless. Interestingly, that may be where much of the characterless feel of digital comes from. Much of what we like about analog devices comes from the slop, the imprecision in the LFO's timing and wave shapes and the character induced by the filtering required by the BBD. On the good side, all of that can be modeled in DSP and some of the really good digital effects do that.

[RobA]

[...]
Maybe 'lack of character', but Dave said it best with 'jack of all trades/master of none'.

That's interesting too. I wonder if any of that is because of they way design them to be kinda reprogrammable -- not reprogrammable really but more reparameterized. It could be that it limits how much they can do to tweak the parameters and models to really get character in specific effects. 

[hammerheadmusicman]

Much of what we like about analog devices comes from the slop, the imprecision

I had a lengthy conversation with an amp tech at a massive gig I played at, and we were talking about valve amps vs ss amps. He was saying that the reason valve distortion sounds so nice is that the breakup stacks harmonics in a way that is musically pleasing to the ear, where as solid state stacks up harmonics differently. Not sure how true that is. But it made sense to me, I never heard a solid state amp, with a good overdrive built in!

[kothoma]

My personal opinion on this is that it's only a question of how much effort you put into the dsp software.
Add a few more filters and you start sounding surprisingly analogue.
And for me nothing beats convolution for reverb. But I don't know of pedals with this cpu power.
For dirt I still prefer analogue, but mostly because of the massive oversampling requirements in dsp.

[pietro_moog]

if you want my opinion, i think this mini HOF is cool for the size, nothing more. i had a hall of fame and i think is sounds good, but not astonishing. TC pedals are good if you are not a tone slut. digital sounds fake to me, and there's nothing we can do about it. their flanger and their vibrato sounds like a joke. a lexicon pcm80 is way more beautiful than these pedals. btw i have a nice tube reverb in my amp, and that's all i need at home.
for my big rig i bought a lexicon, and half of my modulation pedals are useless now (almost).
TC delays like nova delay and nova repeater are great though.

I'm a bit confused. As far as I know, the Lexicon PCM80 is digital and it doesn't have particularly good specs in the CODEC and DSP processor departments either. Make take on the Lexicon stuff is that it's all in their programmers. They write really good algorithms.

The Lexicon PCM80 is an old unit from the early 90s. it is digital (old digital) but sounds good because of the algorithms, like you said. i don't find it noisy, and i like it a lot. the big pain is the lack direct access to all the parameters,like you would have on a pedal, but the presets are very good and 90% of the times i don't feel to edit anything. it was not intended to be a guitar processor, it was a studio multi-fx/reverb unit, and its successors nowadays they cost a LOT of money. tons of records have been made with that sound, and when i use it i feel like i'm a rock star. i am very happy with it.