If your FX board is buffered, does the quality of the patch cables matter?

philrob1

pj310 said:

Is a dedicated buffer pointless if you have buffered pedals on your board? As in would the impedance effect of the buffer be negated as soon as it hits a non true bypass pedal?

To an extent. The BK Butler Tube Driver being one example of a pedal that would require a buffer after it.

Marktigere1

Sporky said:

Some people think wahs sound different with a buffer before them - I don't hear that but it could well vary by individual wah and guitar and cable combo.

I have this with a 1989 Crybaby.  I run into this first and then a TU3 followed by SD1 & DS1.

If the TU3 is before the Crybaby it becomes shrill and orrible!

I have removed the buffer from the Crybaby BTW

Cirrus

I'm going to fall squarely into the "it doesn't matter" camp.

Sorry Gassage, but your hosepipe analogy is a good example of how it's possible to frame an argument that sounds reasonable on the face of it but doesn't really make any sense.

But I agree with you on Brexit, so it's not all bad.


I once made a 100 foot lead, used it directly between guitar and amp and it was very dull sounding as you'd expect from the high capacitance of such a cable. Then I tried guitar-> 3ft cable-> buffered tuner-> 100 ft cable -> amp and it was essentially indistinguishable from just plugging the 3ft cable into the amp. There may have been slight low end differences based on the sound of the buffer circuit I guess, but the test was good enough to convince me that once you've got a buffered signal, the following cables don't really matter much - though RELIABILITY is a factor, and the reason I'll never use those shit pancake jacks.

The only exception would be something like the Fulltone OCD where the output from that pedal is greatly affected by the load it's seeing; If I had an OCD on my board still (I didn't like it that much IIRC) I'd definitely put another buffer, preferably with a variable input impedence, directly after the OCD.

Sporky

Marktigere1 said:

I have this with a 1989 Crybaby.  I run into this first and then a TU3 followed by SD1 & DS1.

If the TU3 is before the Crybaby it becomes shrill and orrible!

I have removed the buffer from the Crybaby BTW

Sounds like it's dependent on the wah then - thanks.

bingefeller

I never thought about this much to be honest with you.  As long as they connect my pedals together that's all I worry about. 

fretfinder

philrob1 said:

pj310 said:

Is a dedicated buffer pointless if you have buffered pedals on your board? As in would the impedance effect of the buffer be negated as soon as it hits a non true bypass pedal?

To an extent. The BK Butler Tube Driver being one example of a pedal that would require a buffer after it.

I thought the point was that a dedicated quality buffer will negate the tone-sucking effect of any pedals you use that have lesser buffers in them, which you would otherwise hear if you didn't have a quality buffer in the line. @ICBM or other experts please help! 

Cirrus

fretfinder said:

I thought the point was that a dedicated quality buffer will negate the tone-sucking effect of any pedals you use that have lesser buffers in them, which you would otherwise hear if you didn't have a quality buffer in the line. @ICBM or other experts please help! 

It can be quite complicated if you want to go into the details, but the principle is pretty straightforward;

A guitar pickup is quite weak, so it's easily bogged down if it has to push its signal through a lot of cable. This causes high frequency roll off - the longer or the worse the cable is, the lower the frequency where signal starts being reduced in volume.

A buffer is like a big repeater station. It takes the weak signal and fortifies it with vitamins and minerals so that it can power through a lot of cable without losing high frequencies.

If that buffered signal then goes into another buffer, say a buffered pedal like a Boss, the signal that comes out of that second buffer will only be as strong/ good as the second buffer is. The vast majority of buffers are fine, and the only negative they have is that often they are *slightly* quieter than the input, so if you have ten buffers in a row your signal is the same bit slightly quieter.

If a pedal is true bypass, then the signal doesn't see the pedal's circuit. It just goes through the input jack socket, the footswitch, then the output jack socket. If there's a buffer then 10 true bypass pedals in bypass mode, the output of your buffer can "see" the input of the amp and vice versa. If you then turn one of the true bypass pedals on, the buffer can only see the input of that pedal, and the amp's input can only see the output of that pedal.

In the case of a pedal like the OCD, that means that you can have a buffer giving you a strong signal to the amp, then you stamp on the true bypass OCD and suddenly you're relying on the OCD's weak output to drive the signal down the rest of the cables etc to your amp - and the OCD gets loaded down, giving you a nice thick tone with lots of treble roll off. Then you stamp on another true bypass pedal, say a delay, after the OCD in your signal chain, and the OCD's output only has to drive a 6 inch cable to the input of the next effect, then the delay's output drives the signal to the amp. Suddenly your tone gets a lot brighter and fizzier because the OCD's output isn't being loaded down as much.

Rocker

Sporky said:

Rocker said

Nonsense. Of course the cable quality matters.

Prove it

Surprised to hear that you think guitar strings are not important @Sporky. As for cables, plug them in. Oh and listen. You do that anyway! Good.

fretmeister

Rocker said:

Sporky said:

Rocker said

Nonsense. Of course the cable quality matters.

Prove it

Surprised to hear that you think guitar strings are not important @Sporky. As for cables, plug them in. Oh and listen. You do that anyway! Good.

Avoiding the question once again. And twisting the words again.

You'll forgive everyone's complete lack of surprise.

Sporky

Rocker said:

Sporky said:

Rocker said

Nonsense. Of course the cable quality matters.

Prove it

Surprised to hear that you think guitar strings are not important @Sporky. As for cables, plug them in. Oh and listen. You do that anyway! Good.

I'm surprised to hear you think it's OK to drown kittens!

fretmeister

Damn. That was better than mine.

But it could be a hashtag thing.

#i'msurprisedtohearyouthinkit'soktohatemarmite

crunchman

My main comment on the subject would be to avoid George Ls.

fretfinder

crunchman said:

My main comment on the subject would be to avoid George Ls.

Why? I've only had them work loose a couple of times...

crunchman

fretfinder said:

crunchman said:

My main comment on the subject would be to avoid George Ls.

Why? I've only had them work loose a couple of times...

That's at least 2 times less than me then.  Not had a single failure since I went back to soldered cables.

fretfinder

crunchman said:

fretfinder said:

crunchman said:

My main comment on the subject would be to avoid George Ls.

Why? I've only had them work loose a couple of times...

That's at least 2 times less than me then.  Not had a single failure since I went back to soldered cables.

Two times more...? 

Sassafras

Good quality cables are important in hi-end audiophile kit, although not to the point of Russ Andrews nonsense, whereas guitar cable doesn't have to carry such a wide frequency range or the amount of detail involved in hi-fi signals.

Dave_Mc

fretfinder said:

I thought the point was that a dedicated quality buffer will negate the tone-sucking effect of any pedals you use that have lesser buffers in them, which you would otherwise hear if you didn't have a quality buffer in the line. @ICBM or other experts please help! 

I don't think that will necessarily help- if the "lesser" buffers aren't unity gain (which is a common complaint), for example, I don't think a "better" buffer will help. If the "lesser" buffer has a gain of, say, 0.95 while the "quality" buffer has a gain of 1, overall your gain will still be 0.95.

ICBM

Dave_Mc said:

fretfinder said:

I thought the point was that a dedicated quality buffer will negate the tone-sucking effect of any pedals you use that have lesser buffers in them, which you would otherwise hear if you didn't have a quality buffer in the line. @ICBM or other experts please help! 

I don't think that will necessarily help- if the "lesser" buffers aren't unity gain (which is a common complaint), for example, I don't think a "better" buffer will help. If the "lesser" buffer has a gain of, say, 0.95 while the "quality" buffer has a gain of 1, overall your gain will still be 0.95.

Correct. A better buffer can't compensate for a worse one, whether it's level loss or tone change - all it will do is reproduce the sound of the worse one.

However, a simple level boost *can* fix the 'tone suck' of lesser buffers, when they're just lesser because of level loss. But at that point it's a booster not a buffer.

Dave_Mc

^ Yeah. I remember in another thread a while back sporky said that a better buffer might compensate for a poor buffer if the poor one's problem was too low an input impedance (i think that's what it was IIRC), but that's kind of getting a bit beyond my pay grade...

Sporky

ICBM said:

Correct. A better buffer can't compensate for a worse one, whether it's level loss or tone change - all it will do is reproduce the sound of the worse one.

It might if the crap buffer is losing treble because it doesn't have a high enough input impedance or output impedance - if the former then a good buffer before it would likely solve the problem, if the latter a good buffer afterwards.

That said, a buffer with low input or high output impedance isn't really a buffer. And in both of those instances you'd be better off chucking the crap buffer rather than adding an extra one.