DEMO PedalPCB Transcendence Boost (Creation Audio Labs MK.4.23 Clean Boost)

[lowpitch]

Build Rating

5.00 star(s)

I was working on some nice enclosure art for this, but it's been a while since my last pedal and I just wanted to build and play something new. So I sanded down a bare aluminum 125B by hand real quick (it wasn't quick at all...) for a brushed aluminum finish. Turned out okay-ish. I like this style of finish better for vintage inspired builds, which this is not.
I'm using a white LED because I like my pedals to blind me while looking at them. No, seriously. It's a little bright even with an 18K CLR and the surface scuffed up a little to diffuse the light better.



The build was easy and quick. While eyeballing where I wanted to put the knob, LED, footswitch and jacks I discovered that it wouldn't quite have fit if I mounted the pot the normal way around. So I hacked together a quick fix by snipping off the pins and off-board wiring the pot upside down.



Is it beautiful? No, but it works. I used 20 AWG solid core which supports the PCB well enough on its own. Fun fact: after putting it all together, I wished I had moved the knob up and the LED down a little. Would have been a better look I think. I also wouldn't have had to off-board wire the pot that way. Oh well...



Tone wise there's not much to say really. It's a clean boost with up to 24 dB of gain. It's not meant to color the sound of the guitar or pedal before it and it doesn't really. The +/- 18V power supply gives it a good amount of clean headroom but the op amp will still clip with humbuckers at higher gain settings. The OPA2134 clips rather gracefully in this circuit though, at least compared to the LF442 in my trusty old MXR MC-401, which is my baseline for clean boosts and what I've been using almost exclusively for that purpose since basically forever. I want to say the two don't sound quite identical but it might just be my imagination. They're both very transparent, the MXR is just a tad noisier though. I'll have to record some loops and do a little shootout some time.



Audio demo: https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/...o-labs-mk-4-23-clean-boost.24896/#post-317445

 

[giovanni]

I like your style!
Thread 'Transcendence Boost'
https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/transcendence-boost.17749/

 

[lowpitch]

I like your style!
Thread 'Transcendence Boost'
https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/transcendence-boost.17749/

Ha. Pedal buddies. Cool knob, I like it better than mine. Is that a Tayda chromium enclosure? I built one pedal with that color and decided never again. It scuffs up so easily.

 

[giovanni]

Ha. Pedal buddies. Cool knob, I like it better than mine. Is that a Tayda chromium enclosure? I built one pedal with that color and decided never again. It scuffs up so easily.

I think it was yeah. I haven’t noticed a lot of scuffing yet but I also haven’t used this pedal in forever.

 

[MichaelW]

I dig the sanded look! This is a great very very transparent boost, but I still hear a little sumpin sumpin going on when it's on. I don't use mine much as I use boosts to sculpt my sound and tend to use boosts with a little more color. Great solution for the pot!

 

[lowpitch]

I recorded some demos to determine how the pedal does or doesn't color the tone of the guitar at different boost levels.
The loops were recorded from the guitar straight into my audio interface. They were then played back from the line-out of my audio interface into a Palmer Daccapo reamp box, which is plugged directly into the Transcendence. I volume matched the recordings in my DAW and cut the loops back to back in the following order:

1. Raw DI
2. Pedal on, boost at minimum (unity gain)
3. Pedal on, boost at ~10 o'clock (+6.8 dB)
4. Pedal on, boost at ~2 o'clock (+16.8 dB)
5. Pedal on, boost at maximum (+24.4 dB)

No guitar amp, speaker cabinet or post-processing, other than the volume matching.

Bridge humbucker (Seymour Duncan TB-5 Custom):
View attachment transcendence_hb_vol_matched.mp3

Neck single coil (Seymour Duncan SH-1 '59, coil split):
View attachment transcendence_sc_vol_matched.mp3

With the coil split SH-1, the pedal stays clean throughout the entire range of the boost knob. With the rather high output TB-5, the transients start to clip at 1-2 o'clock on the boost knob. Other than that, overall coloration of the signal is minimal at best and doesn't appear to vary with different boost levels.

Edit: Listening back to the loops this morning and it does seem there's a tiny loss of highs with the pedal on. Bare in mind, I recorded the guitar DIs with a very short cable directly into the audio interface, so treble roll-off due to cable capacitance will have been at a minimum. Also, the reamp box has a transformer inside, which will likely color the tone at least somewhat. In a regular guitar setup, the difference between pedal off and on will probably be smaller than in the demos above – and it is already quite small in my opinion.