It don't own either of these pedals but I'll give it a stab.
On the Orange, it's important to understand which controls effect level and how. The Fuzz control is the input gain and determines the level of the signal hitting the fuzz circuit. In other words turning up the Fuzz will increase saturation and volume. The Volume adjust the level coming out of the pedal. I watched a video demo of the pedal and he had Fuzz at about 8:30 and Volume at about 10:00. The sound was pretty fuzzy, but the level between bypass and fuzz was pretty well matched.
In my experience it's not unusual for a fuzz pedal to have distortion even when the input gain is turned to its lowest setting.
I would expect the Volume control to be capable of producing a pretty hot output as this pedal is intended to function sort of like a tube screamer....in other words its designed to provide a hot enough signal to push the front end of a tube amp into distortion.
Whenever you have a high gain circuit like a fuzz it will generate internal noise and also magnify any Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio problems in your signal path preceding the fuzz pedal.
The reason fuzz pedals reveal noise problems in your signal path is because any time you generate distortion there is a bit of compression associated with the process. Fuzz pedals are high gain and have a lot of compression. When you are playing the noise floor is pushed down, so you don't notice it. When you stop playing you have massive amounts of gain amplifying every little bit of noise. This brings the noise floor up where you can hear it very clearly. If you use a compressor you will notice the same problem to some degree. While you are playing it sounds fine, but when you stop playing the compressor opens up to full gain and you hear extra circuit noise. If you have a compressor after your fuzz, you're really asking for noise problems.
It's fairly common for guitarist who run high gain to use a noise gate after their pedals to cut the noise off when they are not playing. IMHO probably the best pedal noise gate is the ISP Decimator II G String.
DECIMATOR II G-STRING PEDAL - ISP TechnologiesISP Technologies There is also a non G STring version that is less of hasssle to patch, but it doesn't do as good of a job.
If the Darkglass B7K won't produce distortion, my best bet is it is broken. But if you don't understand the outputs and how all the controls work it's possible that's it's not adjusted or patched properly. For example the pedal has a parallel output that is just a clean copy of the input.
The amount of distortion on the output depends on having the distortion engaged and adjusting the Level (output), Drive (input gain), and Blend controls. Per the webpage the clean signal is at unity gain, so you need to adjust the other controls to get the desired level of distortion and then balance the levels of the clean channel and distortion channel. If you have the Drive and Level controls maxed and there is no signal when to turn the Blend control toward the Distortion channel, that part of the circuit is totally dead. If you still get sound but the signal remains clean, there is still something wrong with the circuit. You can try using another pedal to hit the B7K with a hotter signal, but the bass's signal should be plenty.
