When I came home this afternoon, no power in the world would have been able to get between me and my pedal testing habits. So I came in the door and went straight ... for some chores I forgot about. But with the Kitchen spotless and the floors vacuumed I could finally sit down and draft that minty box for pedalboard duty.
I got mine as is - no box no manual. Well, I've been reading on the interwebs and so I knew what to expect.
The actual gain knobs for both channels are hidden on the inside, on the outside is the gain trim knob and the two volume knobs. Explained in my words, on the inside you set the difference in gain between the two channels. The trim knob adds to that. Can it also subtract? I have no idea, but I'll check.
Once you got your head wrapped around all that, it's pretty straightforward.
I must admit that I love to have two separate master volume knobs on a two channel pedal. I hate it when adding more gain also bumps up the volume and you make everyone jump when you hit that second stage.
The tonal options are somewhat limited. The only thing you can do is cut the bass, but that knob is designed with a guitarist in mind, so you're cutting right into the meat when you touch the knob, so you don't.
Now, I set the gain trim to about 10 o'clock and both volume knobs to noon, and plugged it in.
When I hit the button, I was surprised that I had exactly matched unity, because there was no bump or loss in volume to be detected. It sounded awesome, but there was not even the slightest hint of overdrive.
I raised the gain trim, but still no grind. To make sure it's working I hit the second channel and holy smokes that is what happens when you push a recording console way past 11 and the unpleasant distortion is so strong it is getting unpleasant distortion on its own and two wrongs make a right. That is fuzz. No other word for it.
So I opened up the little fella and poked around the innards. Nice. Obviously hand made. And that little transformer in there is cute. Not too much else going on, which makes the two trim pots easy to find.
Labeling them would have been a nice touch, but I found out which is which - because one was dimed all the way and one was set to 0. I turned them both to something I deemed more reasonable and went back to playing.
The fuzz side got a bit more friendly, but on the low gain side, I could not make it distort at all.
That 24V thing really gives it some headroom, it seems.
Well, at some point a massive facepalm was due. Two knobs. The pedal is british. The british are driving on the wrong side of the road and they use Orange amps, where the controls are left handed, too.
I did assume that the right button was 'on/off' while the left button was 'moar!'.
I went outside and got into the passenger seat of my car, pretending to hold a steering wheel -- and made wroom wroom noises for a while until my brain realigned, upon which I went back to the Broadcast and managed to use it right (which was now left) for the first time.
Now everything made perfect sense. There is still plenty of headroom, but you can sense that this pedal is meant to be used with a guitar rather than a bass.
Set to low gain, so that the amount of dirt is controlled by the playing dynamics, it is hard to play in the low registers without audible distortion, while struggling to get some hair in the upper registers.
At first glance, this did not look very useful to me. But hey, It's a pedal with two foot switches. The higher gain setting was a ton of fun once I tamed it down a lot (well it was fun when dimed, too - only not very useful for my purposes). The lower gain setting with the gain reduced even more cleared up nearly completely.
Please forgive me If I have to resort to audiophile vocabulary here, but I felt that with the Broadcast set to super low gain, my sound tidied up in the higher spectrum while the mids saw a hint of focus. It's one of those effects where you are not entirely sure if you can hear them and then you shut it off and it suddenly becomes apparent because the change in sound is there.
Depending on what you have in your signal chain I think many bass sounds could actually benefit from having a clean Broadcast on the pedalboard.
