- Build Rating
here’s an odd one, a bloody buffer, who needs a buffer?
Well a while back I helped a mate build a PPCB frequency interchange filter, and trying it at the start of my signal chain - even with the filters turned to have as little effect as possible it seemed to make a big change to my pedalboard sound run at the start of my chain … which got me interested in something at the start of my chain…
Then I was looking cobbling together a preamp that uses a +-15v supply - Aion’s L4 preamp I built used a power converter to do this so figgured I could do that. While I have the preamp at the end of the chain why not do a buffered loop at the start of the chain? About 3 min later I got a message from someone who had bought (secondhand) a pedal I had built and was asking if I made pedals and could I make a version of the EUNA (as spotted on pino’s board) - explaining I wasn’t a skilled pedal maker, just a bloke with a soldering iron I said ild make one for him and sell at cost so I get to try it out …
One Musikding kit later, a few hours with a soldering iron, a bit of swearing about lead free solder, a lot of noise bug fixing and it’s together - I think I must have damaged a trace which caused my problems …
And it sounds …
Good? Compared to all the zero other buffers I’ve tried? It buffers.
In my signal chain it was before a valetone loft series oc10 that I think has a buffer in it, or I tried it direct into a hx stomp … and in my bass in active and passive mode.
First of all, I think it’s doing the thing I’ve seen other pedals do where it’s a higher input impedance so sounds more open - I think it’s 3.3M or something, compared to the usual 1M - with a passive instrument that just sounds nice - if I had to bet what people hear as the ‘improvement’ on it I would guess that’s it.
Overall it did sound better on. The switches are interesting little EQ tweaks, harmonics are like real high end presence, kinda counteracted the top end cut of the hx stomp cab sim when that was on in a nice way.
Highs was kinda annoying on a bass - maybe sounds good with drive or something..
And low was a nice bass boost that felt nice - but sometimes made things feel too bloated.
Into previously mentioned octave set at -1 it helped get a nice fat sound, or a more metallic one; into chorus and reverb the high and harmonics switches help it feel more present… so nice
Overall - a nice pedal, It’s not as big a “oh that sounds nicer” compared to the thr Frequency interchange filter - so maybe some kind of mutant of this not buffer with an added High pass filter would be the best of both worlds.
I thought I dreamed there was a version of the Skeptical buffer with a 0/9v power supply rather than +15/-15 And it would be interesting if it sounds much different as I have an inherent distrust of charge pumps!!
Worth making, esp as it’s not cost me anything to try … having not built any other buffers who knows how good on not this circuit is compared to another with 3.3M input!!
