Exar - HM-02 Heavy Metal [schematic]
Posted: 04 Feb 2023, 12:12
I'm back to Exar pedals tracing, I was a bit busy during the last weeks, and it took me almost a month to finish HM-02 Heavy Metal tracing. According to the pots and warranty card dates, the unit I have seems to be produced and sold in 1999.
It was challenging to trace because of a lot of wiring with resistors in heat sinks attached to them. PCB itself is single-sided and "transparent" in light.
Because of its name, you might guess it should be a Boss HM-2 clone, but the Exar pedal has nothing in common with that circuit
. The gain stage is a discrete op-amp, almost part-to-part copy of Boss DS-2. Then it has Volume control placed before the EQ. And EQ itself is not based on gyrators but a complex active filter network with a mixer stage at the end. I don't think I've seen exactly the same EQ in any other pedal, so my guess is Exar engineers designed it. I wanted to check if I traced EQ correctly and did a SPICE simulation in CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/eh92 ... -hm-02-eq/ . It works in the simulation, so I believe it is correct. Attached is the schematic with buffered bypass switching omitted.
It was challenging to trace because of a lot of wiring with resistors in heat sinks attached to them. PCB itself is single-sided and "transparent" in light.
Because of its name, you might guess it should be a Boss HM-2 clone, but the Exar pedal has nothing in common with that circuit