hey i just got a sho and thing sounds amazing when cranked. however when it is turned off it really muddy's up the tone of my amp. has anyone else experienced this

i find that really odd especially since the super hard on is true bypass..check the cables you are using if still persists i think something is wrong

Ya know it's funny you say that... I've had a Super Hard On (pedal) for a long time; got it within a few months of them being released. I don't use it much , but I used to always think the same thing. I always could swear my signal would muddy up with it in line. It was like a catch22, as it might have been some kind of illusion since the tone was so accentuated with it on (as in more sparkley with some hyped lows and hi's...almost like an aural exciter) .. I never did figure out whether it was the pedal or the auditory illusion... Personally , I don't care if it's true bypass or not, as this is what I heard. I have 2-3 other very hi-end fx that are true bypass where I can hear a rather significant dulling of the tone with the pedals off and in-line. It might just be the switches but they do dull the tone....Then again , there's plenty of non-true bypass pedals where I don't get that dulling! Ya never know

ERIC

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Originally posted by ericb:
Ya know it's funny you say that... I've had a Super Hard On (pedal) for a long time; got it within a few months of them being released. I don't use it much , but I used to always think the same thing. I always could swear my signal would muddy up with it in line. It was like a catch22, as it might have been some kind of illusion since the tone was so accentuated with it on (as in more sparkley with some hyped lows and hi's...almost like an aural exciter) .. I never did figure out whether it was the pedal or the auditory illusion... Personally , I don't care if it's true bypass or not, as this is what I heard. I have 2-3 other very hi-end fx that are true bypass where I can hear a rather significant dulling of the tone with the pedals off and in-line. It might just be the switches but they do dull the tone....Then again , there's plenty of non-true bypass pedals where I don't get that dulling! Ya never know

ERIC

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One must have high quality buffered devices in any signal path in order to alleviate high frequency loss due to capacitance loading in true bypass devices.

Thus sayeth not I, but Bill Finnegan @ Klon and Kevin @ Godlyke/Maxon.

I must say, my ears concur.

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Originally posted by jedrod:
hey i just got a sho and thing sounds amazing when cranked. however when it is turned off it really muddy's up the tone of my amp. has anyone else experienced this

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the super hard-on is true-bypass, using a carling 316 dpdt, same as all my other effects. the loss in clarity could be due to excessive cable length(which always dulls the tone.) when you use a pedal, you have to use two cables, and usually to compare the sound of the true-bypass to the straight cord, a guitarist will unplug the first cord and just play through the one going straight to the amp, which will naturally sound brighter than the two cords in series. the only way to compare what the true-bypass sounds like with the sound of the cords alone is to connect them with a female-to-female adapter replacing the pedal for test purposes.

if doing that, or trying another true-bypass pedal(turned off) in the SHO's place causes a noticable improvement over the bypassed tone of the SHO, then there is certainly something wrong with the SHO's switch or wiring... but i have to tell you, i get this kind of comment all the time, and once the test is performed, people always agree that the SHO makes the signal sound so clear and sparkly when it's on that when it's off, they are left feeling flat, and it is never anything actually wrong with the true-bypass. some people actually react to the clarity of the SHO by saying that it makes their guitar sound "less vintage" and they are disappointed. oh well. 8^) can't please everyone.

you might want to be very careful with that SHO so you can try to trade it in against a SUPER-DUPER 2-IN-1 pedal, which has two super hard-ons in one box and you can leave one on all the time at unity gain and use the other for boost. 8^)

zachary vex

i just want to say that i emailed zachary about this first and he has been nothing but the most helpful. i'm gonna run the true by pass test when i get a chance and get back to him. Theres no way i'm trading it in though. it's red sparkly and in japanese. i guess i'm just gonna have to save for the super duper.

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Originally posted by jedrod:
hey i just got a sho and thing sounds amazing when cranked. however when it is turned off it really muddy's up the tone of my amp. has anyone else experienced this

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Definitely check your cables. If you can visualize the signal path in a true bypass set up, you'll know that it couldn't possibly be coloring your tone.

Cable capacitance is an issue. Check out what Bill F. of Klon fame has to say about why his pedal is not true bypass:

"I designed the Centaur with a buffered output, not true bypass, BY CHOICE - true bypass is a very simple thing for any circuit designer to achieve, and the fact that the designers of most "boutique" pedals choose it has more to do, in my opinion, with their acceptance of conventional wisdom in this regard than it does with any concentrated thought on their part about how to achieve the best, most sonically transparent results in the real world.

The reason, in essence, is cord capacitance. Cord capacitance is a fact of life - all guitar cords, even the low-capacitance types such as the George L's cable, for example, are capacitive: an 18-foot generic guitar store guitar cord (Rapco, etc.) will have anywhere from 1500 to 2000 picofarads of capacitance, and a low-capacitance George L's cord of the same length will have perhaps 500 picofarads, or one-quarter to one-third of that. This capacitance not only robs the signal encountering it of high-frequency response, especially the overtones that are integral to the distinctive sonic signature of every electric guitar, but in my opinion it also wreaks havoc with what I will call the harmonic structure of the signal, the precise way in which all of the signal's high-frequency components fit together to create an important part of that sonic signature.

True bypass, by definition, does nothing to address this real-world problem: the capacitance of the cord following any true-bypass unit in a signal path remains fully able to do the damage described. With a well-designed buffered output, however, the capacitive effect of the cord following the unit is essentially negated; with the Centaur, for example, you could run hundreds of meters of the cheapest, most capacitive guitar cable from the output of the unit and suffer no loss of high-frequency response and no damage to the signal's harmonic structure due to capacitive loading. It is important to emphasize that a buffered output, if it is well-designed (not an easy thing to do), does not add anything to the original signal - it merely prevents the loss of important components of that signal.

I have to concur - I emailed Zack a few months ago and he got back to me in like 4 hours. How this guy can make product and stay on top of customer relations so well I have no idea. I bought my SHO before he was packaging the spare trannys - he sent me 5 in the mail, VERY impressive.

With regards to your problem - I used to put a BBE on my guitar in the FX loop of my (now sold, SOB!) Marshall 2205. Sounded great - hit bypass - Anemic City, comparatively. I had a theory that BBE actually had tone degrading components in the bypass to make the sound worse. That got some laughs.

I think the same thing is happening here.

i think you guys are right. i'm gonna try some different cords. I've been playing guitar for about 8 years(i'm 21 now)but it seems like just in the last year i've started worry about things like tone, so i'm still kinda new to this sorta stuff.

i had the same problem, but quickly went away when i did two things: 1.) i cut down from my 30 ft. runs to 15 ft. i kinda like the high end roll off, but to each his own. 2.) realized that when cranked, the SHO does make my tone alot "hi-fi"ish. I used to leave it on all the time, but after a while liked the 'dark' rhythm tone vs. the 'brighter' lead tone diachotomy i was getting from the SHO.

btw, i've seen the sparkly red one, but not one with japanese. i do have a fuzz factory in japanese, but it's not sparkly. and my particular SHO is sparkly gold while my SupaDupa is plain jane yellow. sounds like you got a really cool one. probably a collectors item.