This may not be the place, bit if @el murdoque and his merry band of “jounalistas” will grant me a moment’s indulgence …
The Broadcast rather unexpectedly arrived this morning from Pedal Empire in Brisbane, Australia. It’s their custom model in mustard yellow with black knobs and a red LED; altogether quite fetching. As mentioned above, it’s the internal voltage pump model (24 V) with the three-way gain switch, which really completely changes the character. I’ve had a couple of hours to play with it, and colour me mustard for impressed.
The centre, low-gain position on the robust and toe-accessible switch is just what I was looking for as an always-on saturation booster, providing some added depth and complexity in the always-on chain of API LLX, Walrus Mira compressor (perhaps soon to be replaced by an API CMP), Radial Mix/Loop (where all the dirt resides), Broughton LPF/HPF, Lightning Boy 23Fe and finally Genzler Magellan Pre/DI. There’s a bit of rarely-used modulation in there, but the “dirt loop” is the sandbox where the fun stuff is.
The Radial box seems to have been discontinued everywhere except New Zealand (a not uncommon situation across the board in my adopted country), but it’s a very nice, compact piece of kit. The class A buffer adds no discernible noise, but does exactly what a buffer should, restoring the sparkle dissipated by all those patch cables and somewhat less-than-true bypasses, so I leave it on even when not using the pedals in the loop. The recessed mix-knob is set to about 80% wet and filthy, and 20% clean and dry, just enough of a pillow for the mud-wrestlers to roll around on. Or better, given that the impression it leaves is that of a true mix rather than two parallel signals, just enough oxygen to keep keep them from suffocating. In any case, the current combatants are the Broadcast, a Russian Analogworm Orbit fuzz (basically a fuzzface circuit with an internal transformer to shield the pair of germanium diodes from the buffered circuit outside, as well as a gate and separate tone and mid frequency controls) and a DMB four knob Stellar Drive. For those playing along at home, that’s now a total of four transformers in the signal path; the only one I can be absolutely certain is adding to the pleasing (to my ear) saturation is the Lightning Boy, for obvious reasons, but I’m pretty confident that they are integral to the API and Hudson boxes. The jury (of one) is out with regards to the effect of the transformer in the fuzz.
The Broadcast’s three modes function for me as “character saturation” and boost, light to moderate overdrive, and fuzz, more or less. Stacking any of these into the Analogworm with the gate dialled in untethers a snarling, spitting werewolf, much wilder than it can ever be on its own. The Stellar drive (a nice stacked-FET, Blues Driver type with a very broad range of overdrive, sadly long-discontinued) is much more friendly when stacked, essentially giving more of what it already does. Managing all three together with the Broadcast in high-gain/fuzz mode is like trying to crack a walnut with three jackhammers loosely tied together with razor wire. I’m still sweating.
One thing that suprised me about the Broadcast is the utility of low-cut knob. Far from “sucking all the bass out of my tone” as the kids say, the Broadcast actually seems to add low end as the gain is increased. Whether this is in part a function of residing in a loop with some mixed clean signal, I can’t now say (maybe I’ll extract it later and try it solo), but turning the low cut up a touch to about 8 o’clock really restores the definition otherwise lost.
Forgive me if that constitutes a derailing, but hopefully there’s something of relevance to someone in all that.
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