Monday, July 19, 2010

HiFi DS1 Mod

Shortly after i did the standard Marshall JCM Mod i wanted to see if i could bring the noise floor of the pedal down a notch (bring the hiss down)

It is said that Boss use cheap components in there pedals & this is the main reason why some are noisy like the stock DS1. When you open up your DS1 its true the parts are cheap & this is because of manufacturing costs so we cant expect hifi parts for such little money.

There are a few guys out there that sell "hifi" mods for boss pedals supplying you will components of the same value but of high quality, this in turn makes your DS1's noise floor (hiss) level drop. does it work??? i wanted to find out.

If we change all the capacitors to hi quality film caps with a tolerance of +/- 5% (well at least as many as we can change) & then change all the resistors to metal film resistors with a tolerance of +/- 1% using higher quality components than stock with lower noise should bring the overall noise floor of the DS1 down, well at least a little bit.

with a schematic handy i took a trip to the electronics store and purchased every resistor value in metal film resistors (that are suppose to have less noise than carbon film) & also got the rest of the values of film capacitors.

After about an hour of de-soldering and soldering i replaced every resistor with from carbon film to metal film and every capacitor i could to film caps with a tighter tolerance including most of the electrolytic caps.

THE RESULT:- the pedal did seem like the noise floor had been reduced a little bit but honestly not by much, however the overall sound was a little more clearer. This could be from the metal film resistors & film caps or it could just be that the tolerance of the updated components are tighter, therefore the circuit changed slightly. Either way to pedal is slightly better so if you have the time to do it i think its worth the change.

Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal

If you look closely i forgot one resistor hiding under that transistor, but i replaced it the day after i took the photo. if you want to see a stock DS1 circuit board check out my previous post here:

1 comment:

  1. Right, tighter tolerances shouldn't have an effect on noise. In fact most op-amp overdrive/distortions (including Tube Screamers and Big Muffs) have this problem, since the input signal is hugely amplified and then clipped. For noisy single coil pickups it's really bad, for humbuckers almost non-existent.

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