The Boss LS-2...

digitalscream

...has to be, hands-down, the worst fucking design for a pedal, EVER.

Seriously.

It's a brilliant idea, and - in terms of functionality - perfect for all sorts of situations. However, it's basically impossible to neatly slot it in to any kind of neat, compact pedalboard unless you're willing to sacrifice at least one other pedal space for it. When it's a pedal that, by definition, is supposed to make life easier, it's unforgivable.

I mean, really - did they have to make the assumption that nobody would ever want to use it with angled jacks? Try fitting the fuckers in there without leads and jack barrels poking up and asking to be stomped on and broken.

However, that's not the real problem; I could live with that, if it was the only design issue. However:

ALL THE SOCKETS ARE THE WRONG FUCKING WAY ROUND

Every pedal I've ever come across has the input on the right and the output on the left. Why, therefore, does this pedal have the send on the left and the return on the right? The only way to make it work without having patch cables crossing over all over the fucking place is to turn all your other pedals upside down; basically making them all but impossible to use for the sake of making this one work.

They could easily have fixed this - in fact, there are two ways:

• SEND A and RETURN A on one side, SEND B and RETURN B on the other
  
• SENDs on the right, RETURNs on the left

Either of these would make it possible to construct a decent, neat pedalboard. But no. That would be too fucking easy.

I know, I shouldn't let shit like this piss me off. Having just spent the last half hour trying to come up with a working layout for my board, though, I'm just plain angry.

Fuck you, Boss.

monquixote

I feel that way about ZVex pedals. 

chrispy108

I love this post...

ICBM

No, the LS-2 isn't the worst, although I agree with all your points (and there are a couple of others) - there is another Boss pedal I recently tried that's even worse, and which I had a rant about in a random thread recently .

The FDR-1 "Fender Deluxe Reverb" pedal. Actually sounds very good - but almost unusable in a live situation due to a catalogue of design errors - most of them operational rather than physical, apart from the knobs.

In Boss's slight defence, have you ever taken an LS-2 apart? How they got six jacks and the rest of the bits into a standard Boss casing is a minor miracle...

digitalscream

ICBM said:

In Boss's slight defence, have you ever taken an LS-2 apart? How they got six jacks and the rest of the bits into a standard Boss casing is a minor miracle...

It's only slight; to my mind, if you have to make something unusable in order to fit everything in a box, you need a bigger box. In any case, they could easily have fixed it by routing the signal differently as noted.

In fact, taking it apart is my next job - looking at it, the sockets are all at different heights relative to the board (I presume, at least - they're not in a straight line), which suggests that they might just be wired to the board instead of soldered to it. If that's the case, I might be able to reroute the signal in a more sensible manner.

octatonic

Rewire it.

fretmeister

I love myLS2. No probs with angled jacks for me!

digitalscream

Dear god, it gets worse. The only jacks which are soldered to the board are the ones which actually need to be moved.

I actually can't think of a way to make this work and keep the thing on the front of my board (which is the whole sodding point of it in the first place) without spending more than the damn thing cost me on a George L cable kit, since their low-profile right-angle jacks won't get in the way.

I swear this pedal's trying to ruin my life.

monquixote

It gets worse if you open the case it releases an anti tampering powder that gives you syphilis. 

digitalscream

monquixote said:

It gets worse if you open the case it releases an anti tampering powder that gives you syphilis. 

I could go off you, y'know.

Well, I just looked up the cost of recabling my board with a George L kit. £102.45.

...anybody want to buy a Boss LS-2? Brilliant pedals...

ICBM

octatonic said:

Rewire it.

lol... you haven't opened one up, have you?

digitalscream said:

It's only slight; to my mind, if you have to make something unusable in order to fit everything in a box, you need a bigger box. In any case, they could easily have fixed it by routing the signal differently as noted.

If they'd designed it that way in the first place, yes.

digitalscream

ICBM said:

lol... you haven't opened one up, have you?

It's a horror beyond my prior imagination.

I don't know if this is true of all of them, but the wires were so tight that it was barely possible to pull the circuit board back and take a look inside, even after I'd manages to pull the power sockets clear of the case. I had to take a high-res photo to see what was in there.

monquixote

digitalscream said:

monquixote said:

It gets worse if you open the case it releases an anti tampering powder that gives you syphilis. 

I could go off you, y'know.

That's OK I'm not planning to get physically intimate with you now anyway.

ICBM

digitalscream said:

I don't know if this is true of all of them, but the wires were so tight that it was barely possible to pull the circuit board back and take a look inside, even after I'd manages to pull the power sockets clear of the case. I had to take a high-res photo to see what was in there.

True of the ones I've been inside, yes. There's a specific order you have to remove the jacks in to get it all out, and "reassembly is the reverse of dismantling", so if you forget exactly how it was then it becomes a Chinese puzzle with only one way it all fits. Remember which of the little spacer washers go on which jacks too... the ones that fell off when you took it apart so you can no longer tell .

digitalscream

Nah, I'm not going near it. I've seen enough to realise that I'm not going to be able to do much to fix it, so now my choices are:

• Spend £100 on a cable kit to get around the problem.
• Flip it for as close to as much as I paid for it as possible, take the aforementioned £100 and wait for the Joyo PXL Pro to reach these shores, because the price looks to be pretty much exactly the same number.

You can probably guess where I'm leaning on this.

Branshen

I'll let this thread die down before trying to sell my special 90s LS-2 on the classifieds.

Drew_TNBD

Had the EXACT same issue. Pulled it out the chasis.Ripped up the jacks. Intended to fix it one day. Turned chasis into an expression switch for my old M9 setup.

Still have the circuit somewhere, but no jacks and no schematic. So have no clue how to put it back together!! HA!!

steamabacus

Regarding the cables - I had a similar issue with the NS-2. I used standard 'pancake' right angled jacks but ground off a few millimetres on adjacent jacks to enable them to fit. Those pancake jacks are mainly void space inside anyway, so there were no issues. I then filled the resulting hole on the edge of the jack with rubbery PVA adhesive to seal against dirt/moisture.

You can see them on this pic (I only had the jacks sealed with tape when this was taken - the PVA is much neater)...

mike257

Do you use it for multiple modes or are you only doing one type of switching? You could sell it, buy an enclosure and a couple of parts and build yourself a Loop A/Loop B/Bypass pedal with the jacks exactly where you want them and then still buy a couple of Joyos with the change!

mike257

@steamabacus - that's a super-tidy board, love great compact setups like that. Nice work! Is that a JD-10 preamp hiding under your GT-OD?

ICBM

Drew_fx said:

Still have the circuit somewhere, but no jacks and no schematic.

Damn, I could have done with that PCB recently.

If you find it, can you let me know? No hurry now though.

In short - the Boss LS-2 is a great pedal for what it does, if it fits on your board! It's one of the most useful pedals there is for many different applications.

But it's such a nightmare to work on that if you break it, it's probably cheaper to buy a new one than have it repaired. This particularly applies if you've used the wrong power supply and cooked some stuff on the board...