I think my addiction has an addiction. By now, for various unfortunate reasons, the number of timmy & friends I have built and given away is in the double digits. The more I research the difference between the Timmy and the Jan Ray, the less things make sense.
To make things make more sense this time I used a Termina board as a base for a JR, since it's a hybrid between the two circuits, plus a couple stock ones for reference and then I compared them all with a Malekko B:ASSMASTER.
The graphics depict an unholy hybrid of two famous characters, a biological twin and an artificial clone, named "Rem Rei". This representation of an electronically inbred abomination is demurely posing on a Tayda pearl gray enclosure, nestled between the input and output sections of the circuit. I have censored the dangling battery clip with masking tape to reduce the overall lewdness of the gut shot.
Now, I must say, both the stock Termina and Tommy III share the same expected timminess. They sound like a great utility pedal / clean boost when used with other pedals, sexiness enhancer on their own. The Jan Ray I previously built has something *more*. There is a difference in perceived warmth and harmonic content that probably shouldn't be there. I thought maybe it's something due to component tolerance or a lucky mistake, but I built several and the results are the same, even with a blind test.
This one? It sounds more timmyish than it should. The most prominent difference with the coda effects JR, apart from the clipping switch, is now the power section, with a different filtering capacitor and reverse polarity diode.
The conclusion is either scientific (the toan mostly resides inside the voltage sucked by the different reverse polarity diode) or subjective. Maybe psychoacoustic (my ears want to believe) or psychiatric (I have a mental condition that compels me to build the same thing over and over in order to find empirical reasons to keep building the same thing over and over).
