Is the Boss tone bender the new klon?

snowblind

I was in a shop over the weekend looking for new toys. In one I got to see an old 60s 335 being played through a Boss tone bender. Sounded quite interesting so when I got home I went looking for Boss tone bender pedals. 

Average price seems to be about £1000.  For a Boss pedal. Based on a circuit which has about 8 components in it. 

Really?

Granted I don't tend to pay a huge amount of attention to all things fuzzy but still......

fretmeister

It was a very limited edition.

Still silly.

Sassafras

Collectors.

snowblind

Unicorn sh*t limited? 

guitargeek62

Jeez, they’ve jumped then - I toyed with getting one a year or so ago but they were ~£5-600 then and I (rightly) thought that was too much!

snowblind

Having gone back and read the history of the the things I can see a lot of work went into the design but at the same time most of that effort was simply to make the thing sound exactly like one particular instance of the original. A testament to obsessive attention to detail perhaps and given the vagaries of germanium maybe they are truly limited. It was just something of a shock to see that price tag on a Boss pedal. 

Mind you, I have  one of the early HM-2 distortions and those things seem to be going for about 3x what I paid for it new.

Inflation guv'nor, innit.

ICBM

snowblind said:

Inflation guv'nor, innit.

No, the Guv’nor is a Marshall pedal.




It’s mostly not inflation anyway, it’s really just believing that prices will always rise in a limited speculative market. If that’s true I have some tulips to sell…

Fishboy7

Market value is more like £500 not £1000


https://reverb.com/uk/marketplace?query=boss tb-2w&product_type=effects-and-pedals&show_only_sold=true

roberty

snowblind

And about 80% of that circuit real estate is just stuff to maintain some degree of thermal stability.  Allegedly......

UnclePsychosis

The price of these has very little to do with the technical complexity (or otherwise) of the inside and very much to do with collectors doing collector things on account of scarcity. 

stickyfiddle

roberty said:

SMD? Must be rubbish!! 

soma1975

They do sound amazing on the Little Barry video but no getting around it the innards just look depressing. 

Some sort of lesson in there about not listening with your eyes. Or something. 

soma1975

Isn't the FZ-1w born out of their experience making this and only £150?

snowblind

Ah, but it uses silicon transistors instead of those fairy dust vintage germanium oddities. 

Interesting when you think about it. Germanium was in a lot of the early semiconductors but it has its issues and has largely been replaced by silicon. Much more consistent and less prone to thermal runaway. It's particularly interesting in this context where the object is to take relatively pure waveform and make it totally fubar. Is there a limit to just how much the sound can be distorted and if you approach that limit do you care what material was used to do it? Apparently we do.

I guess it's a bit like faces these days. You can take a perfectly good looking face, fill it with botox and silicone, plaster it in paint and the result is, in some quarters, considered attractive when filtered through a phone camera. In the harsh light of day it usually looks like a grouper fish had an accident in the hall of mirrors but each to their own.

I will say though that the tone bender did sound pretty damn good. 

Seziertisch

500 quid maybe a bit less is and has been the market value for these with a good while.

 A lot of speculative pricing on Reverb etc.

The ones priced above that just sit there.

ICBM

snowblind said:

And about 80% of that circuit real estate is just stuff to maintain some degree of thermal stability.  Allegedly......

And about another 10% of it will be the switching circuit, which I think will be the standard Boss bistable electronic switching, but driving the relay to make it true bypass.

The relay will increase the current consumption too, it’s really not a great idea. Hopefully they’ve at least not made the daft mistake of having the unpowered state ‘on’…

To be fair, given the extra complexity and the design work that must have entailed, it’s at least a £100 pedal.

RaymondLin

I have one, it's really good.  I took the board to my friend's over the weekend and he called it "Thats the sound of Mud Honey."  I have no idea who Mud Honey was (embarrassingly), but I'll take his word on it.

They were like £330 new I think?  Which is still absurd for a tone bender.

Musicman20

RaymondLin said:

I have one, it's really good.  I took the board to my friend's over the weekend and he called it "Thats the sound of Mud Honey."  I have no idea who Mud Honey was (embarrassingly), but I'll take his word on it.

They were like £330 new I think?  Which is still absurd for a tone bender.

Mudhoney - Touch Me I'm Sick [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

soma1975

Mudhoney's most famous album is called 'Superfuzz Bigmuff' not 'Solasound ToneBender'!

Proud moment seeing them at the Venue in New Cross in '91

RaymondLin

soma1975 said:

Mudhoney's most famous album is called 'Superfuzz Bigmuff' not 'Solasound ToneBender'!

Proud moment seeing them at the Venue in New Cross in '91

I did stack it with a King of Tone as well at one point. lol