ilovefuzz.com

ibarakishi wrote:its been i don't know how many months now since i sent to get my DN traced and cloned. came quickly to the conclusion that i don't really enjoy playing electric guitar without it. Still pushing through and suffering on without it while its out of my hands, but man it feels like im just dragging my teeth across sandpaper every time i sit down to play. cannot wait to get it back in my hands. will be relieved when i can hoard pcbs of it and have three backup pedals on top of that so that i don't ever have to deal with this again in my lifetime hopefully. At first it bothered me that its such a huge part of what i do, but now ive just come to terms with the fact that the clang indeed owns me and i in no way own the clang whatsoever...

coupleonapkins wrote:I held off on a Surveyor for the time being, since I am cheap and am studying the Baxandall 2-band EQ further. Using something similar, wouldn't hitting a tube-derived OD (or facsimile) be about right? I think the power of the EQ is really the diamond in the clang (which could possibly be applied to anything with the right amount of headroom to avoid compression, or maybe that's the actual thing to do?). Clang should be available and within all of our hands if so, and perhaps it's just the right concoction?

In the meantime, I've been listening to this for a while just to figure out the panning (ca. 1987, I think), let alone the IVP-ness (TWSS) of the thing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLUX5HNqCX0[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLUX5HNqCX0

Surveyor Manual Overlord wrote:The original IVP is a full-featured rackmount preamp with two input channels, an active Baxandall shelving tone stack for highs and lows, a four-band parametric EQ for mid frequencies, clean and “Tube Voice” channels, and multiple buffered patch points for external effects. The Surveyor distills the IVP down to just the input stage, Baxandall EQ, and Tube Voice drive circuit.

In the IVP, the EQ is placed before the drive circuit, allowing for unique tone shaping. Rather than shaping the final overdriven tone, the user can emphasiz ewhich frequencies become distorted. Boosting highs brings forth not just treble content, but midrange and presence as well. Boosting the lows can add heft at lower settings or overwhelm the drive circuit in a musical fashion.

The Tube Voice circuit itself uses discrete transistors and a small, low-bandwidth transformer to generate clipping. This combination responds in a smooth manner at lower gain settings but becomes fuzzy and aggressive at higher settings. Thanks to the transformer’s sharp cut in the KHz range, it never gets too harsh. You will find that the Surveyor does far more than noise rock clang – it is in fact capable of a huge variety of saturated textures.

goroth wrote:I’ve got a laowiz isotope, which is a diy ivp style circuit, and from what I understand the distortion (some of it??)is the transformer being overloaded. It definitely doesn’t sound like other drive pedals I’ve played. But yeah, you might be able to get ballpark with a bax into a tubey circuit

AionFX wrote:The Isotope Amp Overdrive is an adaptation of the “Tube Voice” channel of the Intersound Instrument Voicing Preamplifier, a rack preamp from the late 1970s that was favored by Steve Albini and the Grateful Dead among others.

The IVP’s Tube Sound channel was unique in its method of overdriving the signal. There are no diodes to be found, but rather, the signal is clipped by overloading a miniature transformer. Add in a two-band tone control and you’ve got a really flexible circuit that doesn’t look or sound quite like anything else.

The Isotope Amp Overdrive is a greatly reduced version of the IVP, extracting just the Tube Voice channel which makes up approximately 25% of the whole preamp circuit, which also includes a clean channel and 4-band parametric equalizer. It’s been adapted to run off of +/-9V instead of +/-15V like the original. However, all the character of the drive channel is retained and it makes a great standalone drive pedal if you want something a little different!

One thing to mention: the Treble knob may oscillate at the very high end of rotation. We tried several things to mitigate this during development, including better power filtering and tweaking the values of the treble control, even a new PCB layout, but nothing really fixed it. However, since it only impacts the last 5-10% of the rotation which is really outside the useful range of the control, we opted to release it as-is.

Chankgeez wrote:^^^ That's off a great compilation.