Boss NS-2

PaulRR

As a player who uses a fair bit of gain I was intrigued when That Pedal Show covered noise gates, especially given how far out of their normal playground the need for suppressing that sort of noise is. Plus it was great to see the pair of them playing Slayer - very entertaining. 

I already had an NS-2, but only ever used it at the start of my signal chain. Seeing the TPS four cable approach (which makes total sense) I spent Sunday rewiring my pedal board... only to find a pretty major problem...

There was lots of silence (good), but when I played there was a very noticeable volume swell at the beginning of each phrase as the noise suppression abated. I tried swapping all sorts of things around, tried changing settings, but the problem persisted. It was pretty frustrating as it rendered the NS-2 unusable, and there followed a fair bit of Googling, most of which yielded very little.

But eventually I found a thread on SevenString.org from someone with the same problem as mine, who tried most of the same things, and for that user it eventually turned out to be a fault with the pedal. So I took advantage of the recent Reverb pedal sale and bought a used NS-2 with 15% off, so I could try an A/B test with my existing pedal. I plugged in the new pedal tonight and it all worked perfectly!

So if anyone out there is having the volume swell problem when using 4CM then be aware there seems to be a faulty batch of NS-2s out there. Mine was five or six years old, if that helps.

Bezzer

Not exactly the same problem but I had to stop using the 4CM / X config with mine because of an ear piercing whistle that kicked in when ANY gain was applied.  Went through all sorts to try and fix it including power supply upgrades, new cables, new NS-2, magic ... just nothing.  Annoying.