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Hi, anyone think that changing the opamp in the drive side of this thing may alter the distortion, as it is universally known to be rubbish? Or any suggestion would be good, pls. don't want to bin it, yet.

How much?

$233 for a Tubescreamer clone and a microamp clone in the same box! I'm charging much too little for pedals that sound great if they can charge so much for rubbish!

Changing the op-amps in this thing will have little of no effect on the sound of it. If it sounds bad, it's because they've got some of the capacitor values wrong in an effort to make it sound "different". Sell it. If it's in "as new" condition, you'll get most of what you paid for it. Then take the money, buy a diecast box, a couple of sockets, a couple of footswitches, and build a nice, neat Vero version of the Tubescreamer (pick your favourite variant), and pick your favourite booster stage. Spend $20 on parts and invest an evening of your time to put it together. Paint it in pretty colours and label the controls, and either use it yourself or sell it to finance your new two or three builds....

Thanks for that. I do have a number of modded and diy "tubescreamers" and some, but I like the boost on this thing and would just like try to make the drive side of it more pleasant, if poss, but if there are no ideas or suggestions apart from selling it, so be it.

We've discussed this pedal before. No one has traced it so we don't know what the drive side is inorder to fix it. I had one of these and it was a huuuuuuuuuuge let down.

The booster is useful, the distortion is just crap...

Improved version of the booster:



- included voltage doubler
- second opamp uses for Vref
- included millenium-2 bypass with input grounded in bypass mode
- booster/buffer switch

- C7 should be 100µF, not 10µF
- use a higher quality opamp, like LM833

Bill_Mountain wrote:We've discussed this pedal before. No one has traced it so we don't know what the drive side is inorder to fix it. I had one of these and it was a huuuuuuuuuuge let down.

The distortion side of this thing looks very like a Tubescreamer™ (big surprise!), but one version I saw had "to-ground" diodes as well - presumably to give more distortion. It sounded pretty bad to my ears - I tried it with two differing amplifiers and it just sounded appalling. The frequencies of the filters in the thing have been chosen really strangely, so there's not a "mid-hump" like a Tubescreamer™. The tone control just decreases treble. It's just wrong!

Maybe a mod for the tone control would be a good start. I really like version "AMZ tone 4" from this document:
www.muzique.com/misc/AMZ_tone.pdf
That's the one that I use in my Rose Screamer.
If there are diodes in the feedback loop and another pair to gnd, I'd suggest to remove the latter.

mictester wrote:

Bill_Mountain wrote:We've discussed this pedal before. No one has traced it so we don't know what the drive side is inorder to fix it. I had one of these and it was a huuuuuuuuuuge let down.

The distortion side of this thing looks very like a Tubescreamer™ (big surprise!), but one version I saw had "to-ground" diodes as well - presumably to give more distortion. It sounded pretty bad to my ears - I tried it with two differing amplifiers and it just sounded appalling. The frequencies of the filters in the thing have been chosen really strangely, so there's not a "mid-hump" like a Tubescreamer™. The tone control just decreases treble. It's just wrong!

I'm pretty sure mine was diodes to ground.