Re: Blog: The SD Pickup Booster Pedal
If it's not a typo, I agree with Artie, I can't make sense of it. In today's market saturated with all kinds of transparent and/or coloring boost pedals, this one seems to send a mixed message. If you pitch a boost as being transparent, and you expect the musician to plug the guitar straight into it (not after a buffer) then in my experiences the minimum input impedance should be 470k, with 1 meg or higher being optimal.
The Suhr is an example of someone offering a 1meg input,
http://www.suhr.com/suhr-guitar-pedals/iso-boost/
While the Lehle Sunday Driver starts with 1meg, but a switch allows you to go up to 4megs:
http://lehle.com/EN/Lehle-Sunday-Driver/MANUAL#go
Of course if you put it
after a buffered pedal, then the signal is low impedance and it's entirely possible the new Booster IS adequately transparent for most players. But therein lies the product design and marketing conundrum: The resonance switches ONLY work as intended if the Pickup Booster is placed directly in line with a passive pickup guitar, no buffer in between. So the way I see it, it's EITHER a transparent boost when placed after a buffer, or with active/low impedance pickups, OR it's a less-than-transparent boost, but one that colors the sound in all three positions, 1, 2, and off. You can still sell a pedal like that in the marketplace, you just have to call it what it is, and teach people what to expect in their rigs.
If I were advising someone to buy this pedal, I would say place it after a buffer, and forget about the resonance switches, or absolutely try before you buy in a store, so that you can listen to what the 250k load does to your guitar's tone. You may like it, you may find it dulls the tone too much. I mean, it's basically like running an extra 250k volume pot hanging off your guitar. The engineers aren't stupid people, so I imagine they have an answer to this question. Perhaps it's addressed in the owners manual, or it was a decision made while listening to the sound of the pedal. Maybe Scott will chime in with a response from engineering like he did on the decision to use a different chip than the one first listed while marketing the 805.