Workin' on it. Patience!Originally Posted by tunghaichuan
That's an adapter to be able to use the 2x4 opamp/socket with the 1x8 pin socket array on the DS-1 PCBOriginally Posted by tunghaichuan
Gotta go drill that hole for the switch now....
UPDATE 1/10/08: I finished up the DS-1 mod last night, mounting the 3-way clipping mode toggle switch on the left side of the pedal, adjacent to the output jack (see stock DS-1 image below). The directions suggested mounting it up through the top of the pedal, just below the Tone knob. However, this would have entailed drilling right up through the "Tone" label on the housing and would make the mod look kind of amateurish, I thought. The risk of running the switch out the side is that it's less well protected there. So if you tend to bang your pedals around or move them a lot, you'd probably want to follow the suggestion to go through the top.
I didn't have the time last night to get into recording the "after mod" clips, but I did spend a few minutes playing my LP Std. through my Fender Blues Junior with it. The mod certainly seems to have filled out the pedal's tone, making it less treble-heavy. It's still a pretty raw sounding distortion, considerably edgier in tone than my Marshall GV-2 Guv'nor Plus or even the modified Rat clone I built. The treble/upper-mids component of the distorted tone is still pretty dominant , but the mods have strengthened the bass and lower-mids to give a fuller and more balanced sound. The premium Burr-Brown opamp does indeed seem to keep the tone very sharp and focused.
The two different clipping modes function as expected, with the 1N4002 silicon diodes giving a more typical DS-1 tone, while the red LEDs give a bigger, deeper and very noticeably LOUDER tone, with less outright distortion. This makes sense, since the LED's higher voltage threshold means that they clip less of the signal. I also tried the switch's middle position, the "diode-lift" mode, which takes the clipping stage right out of the signal path and turns the pedal into a preamp boost. This position is even louder than the LED's, since no portion of the signal is being dumped to ground by clipping diodes. It reduces the distortion, but certainly doesn't eliminate it, since the signal into the amp is boosted so considerably, analagous to dialing up the preamp gain in the amplifier itself.
I'll try to record those "after" clips tonight, or over the weekend, at the latest. Then you can hear the impact for yourself....