Ch0jin
January 26th, 2011, 11:02 PM
I've long been intrigued by the kits BYOC offer, but living in Australia as I do, I can't buy direct from them. That put me off buying from them for quite a while, instead doing some vero builds and GGG kits. Then, while looking around on ebay I saw the BYOC Phase Royal kit for the same price as BYOC so I thought "OK Why Not" and bought it. Fast forward to now...
My mini-review.
The Kit.
As has been said time and time again by builders, the kits are great and the quality of the PCB's is excellent. The only PCB I've been more impressed with is the Boss CE-2 one I bought from tonepad, it's a work of art!
Instructions aren't provided in the kit, so you'll need to print them off from the website, but this is standard practice so no issue there.
The kit goes together perfectly and it really is paint by numbers. I'm sure anyone who knows how to solder would have this kit up and running in a matter of hours whether they know anything about electronics or not.
I do have some critiques though.
Whilst I appreciate being able to cram all those controls into a 125B is advantageous to someone with a crowded pedalbaord, it leaves things very tight control wise if you decide, as I did, to ditch the boring generic black plastic knobs. I used the smallest knobs I could find for the lower two controls and they still only miss each other by a millimetre. This is accentuated a little by the fact the case was not drilled exactly right either. The "Blend" control is actually about 3mm too high.
Of course I could have used a different case and not board mounted the pots, but these aren't particularly cheap kits so tossing away a case seemed like a substantial waste to me.
The only circuit modification I made was to wire a new white LED in a chrome bezel to pulse in time with the LFO which was electronically simple, but physically a tight squeeze as I could no longer use the board mounting.
The circuit is based on the MXR Phase 90 with all the popular mods already done, plus, an extra two stages on tap. There is a huge variety of tone shaping available through knob twisting, but for me, I think I probably could have just built a straight up phase 90 as I find I usually leave all the "mods" basically out of circuit.
The Sound
I wasn't immediately in love with the sound either to be frank. Using my Maton with the SD SH1/SH4 combo actually overloads the circuit causing distortion when you pick hard. I've since read that this is "normal" and part of the circuits inherent design. No, running it at 18V doesn't help. That said, I think phasers sound better with some kind of drive in front of them anyway and once you do that, the distortion isn't noticeable so it's not really a big deal. It does tend to be quite trebly in the top part of the sweep and I find myself wishing it had a basic tone control, but I could also do some component tweaking to see if I could smooth it out a bit as another option.
All up it's not a bad pedal and I'll probably hang on to it, but if I were to build another phaser I'd either go for a straight Phase90 or a Small Stone clone using a tonepad PCB. Bear in mind I'd consider myself an advanced builder though, that would not be my recommendation for a beginner.
Anyway... Beauty shot on the bench...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5138/5391636719_4bddacfbd8.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch0jin/5391636719/)
Six Four Phaser (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch0jin/5391636719/) by Ch0jiN (http://www.flickr.com/people/ch0jin/), on Flickr
and short demo...(Maton BB1200 W/B90's and old strings into OCD based drive all at noon into the RC-2, then I just run the loop into the phaser so I can film and tweak :)
b1xfCUQ3d7k
My mini-review.
The Kit.
As has been said time and time again by builders, the kits are great and the quality of the PCB's is excellent. The only PCB I've been more impressed with is the Boss CE-2 one I bought from tonepad, it's a work of art!
Instructions aren't provided in the kit, so you'll need to print them off from the website, but this is standard practice so no issue there.
The kit goes together perfectly and it really is paint by numbers. I'm sure anyone who knows how to solder would have this kit up and running in a matter of hours whether they know anything about electronics or not.
I do have some critiques though.
Whilst I appreciate being able to cram all those controls into a 125B is advantageous to someone with a crowded pedalbaord, it leaves things very tight control wise if you decide, as I did, to ditch the boring generic black plastic knobs. I used the smallest knobs I could find for the lower two controls and they still only miss each other by a millimetre. This is accentuated a little by the fact the case was not drilled exactly right either. The "Blend" control is actually about 3mm too high.
Of course I could have used a different case and not board mounted the pots, but these aren't particularly cheap kits so tossing away a case seemed like a substantial waste to me.
The only circuit modification I made was to wire a new white LED in a chrome bezel to pulse in time with the LFO which was electronically simple, but physically a tight squeeze as I could no longer use the board mounting.
The circuit is based on the MXR Phase 90 with all the popular mods already done, plus, an extra two stages on tap. There is a huge variety of tone shaping available through knob twisting, but for me, I think I probably could have just built a straight up phase 90 as I find I usually leave all the "mods" basically out of circuit.
The Sound
I wasn't immediately in love with the sound either to be frank. Using my Maton with the SD SH1/SH4 combo actually overloads the circuit causing distortion when you pick hard. I've since read that this is "normal" and part of the circuits inherent design. No, running it at 18V doesn't help. That said, I think phasers sound better with some kind of drive in front of them anyway and once you do that, the distortion isn't noticeable so it's not really a big deal. It does tend to be quite trebly in the top part of the sweep and I find myself wishing it had a basic tone control, but I could also do some component tweaking to see if I could smooth it out a bit as another option.
All up it's not a bad pedal and I'll probably hang on to it, but if I were to build another phaser I'd either go for a straight Phase90 or a Small Stone clone using a tonepad PCB. Bear in mind I'd consider myself an advanced builder though, that would not be my recommendation for a beginner.
Anyway... Beauty shot on the bench...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5138/5391636719_4bddacfbd8.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch0jin/5391636719/)
Six Four Phaser (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch0jin/5391636719/) by Ch0jiN (http://www.flickr.com/people/ch0jin/), on Flickr
and short demo...(Maton BB1200 W/B90's and old strings into OCD based drive all at noon into the RC-2, then I just run the loop into the phaser so I can film and tweak :)
b1xfCUQ3d7k