Ryan wrote:Tim, my buddy, I probably would have steered you away from that old one.. you must think it sounds so crude! Super noisy, terrible input stage, not enough filtering.. I took too many liberties with the guitar signal (I'm talking 1M series resistance into inverting input here folks) and the delay line was too lofi... oh man, I feel bad you have such an oldie! Hit me up if you get sick of the noise/sound of that pedal and we'll make an update plan...
There's probably a couple dozen white picket fence finishes out there, Tanya and I really love them too. Pretty cool it's so old though, that's one month into business for us, we sold our first pedal in August 2006.
I didn't send out too many of those old SDDs before people started complaining about the noise. I even heard comments like ridiculous and unusable, did more than one return of custom finishes, had a store say it was unsellable... it was pretty demoralizing.
After that I changed to my patented (not at all, just kidding) input and output buffer scheme with better filtering and made it a much lower noise circuit. And then after that I added the compander to make it even lower noise, plus some extra control for the modulation.
No, no, first off you could have never steered me away from it! I know by now that anything you make is gonna be something special, so there wasn't any way I was letting this puppy get away.
And wow, you're being waaaaay hay hay hay too hard on yourself here; no ifs ands or buts, the SDD is an awesome sounding delay!! Like always, your ear with this pedal was spot on: the tone/character of the repeats is a work of art, and the way it interacts with the guitar/different inputs is natural and dynamic. With any delay,
that's the stuff that really counts.
Ok, sure, there are some quirks when you max out the delay time and repeats level, but I can see what you were doing there. You *could have* limited the range on this knob or that knob to avoid allowing the user to dial in those quirky settings. BUT, had you done that, you would have also eliminated some really awesome settings on this pedal as well. So you left it open for the user to do with as they please, which I think was the right decision.
And all that said, those quirks only come out on a couple
very extreme settings; otherwise there are all kinds great ways to dial in this pedal, all of which cover any normal person's delay needs (and then some).
I very much appreciate (dang, I'm straight up flattered!) your offer to have you update it! Very, very tempting!!!
Geez, now I'm not really sure what to do, I'm torn between:
a) keep this nice 'vintage' Dr. Sci pedal as is (keeping in mind, I do think it already sounds killer)
b) have the honor of you working your space magic on it
I throw it out to you ILFers, what would you do: let Ryan zap this oldie-but-goodie with his update raygun, or keep as is?
