Boss
When I was a kid and starting to become obsessed with guitar gear, there weren’t a lot of options around. My local music stores carried pedals from DoD and Boss for the most part. You could find occasional Ibanez, MXR, or Electro Harmonix pedals, but for the most part it was DoD and Boss. The few pedals I owned were DoD. Every time I took a Boss pedal for a test drive I was massively underwhelmed. Those music store visits back in the late 1980’s lead to a lifetime of not liking Boss gear. To this day I have never owned a Boss pedal because I have never played through one that I liked. The closest I’ve come is a Keeley pedal (the Super Phat Mod) which is a modified version of a Boss Blues Driver pedal. I like the Keeley pedal, but I don’t love it (unlike my Keeley D&M Drive which I absolutely adore).
I have never consciously boycotted Boss, I just never wanted anything they sold…
Until now.
A few years ago a couple of companies released super sophisticated amp load boxes. Universal Audio put out the Ox, which seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately you can almost buy a car with the amount of money you need to shell out for an Ox.* Boss released a similar item called the Tube Amp Expander. The reviews I watched made the thing look pretty amazing, though maybe not quite as amazing as the Ox. The price was similar though and I never gave it a second thought.
Not long ago Boss released a new product. It’s a smaller version of the Tube Amp Expander. It’s called the Tube Amp Expander Core. It has all of the functionality I would want but at a much lower price. Granted, $700 is a ton of money for something like this (in my book, at least) and I don’t know if that price is before or after the orange shit clown’s Japanese tariffs. It is a low enough cost to make me consider it, but probably still too high to actually pull the trigger. It would be really cool to be able to run a direct signal out of my Fender Deluxe Reverb and into my Audio Interface, or even directly into my Macintosh.
…….it’s Boss though…. if I tried one out, history dictates that I would be disappointed. Still…….. oh the places I could go with a box like that. We’ll have to see how the economy holds up in the near future. There’s a really good chance the orange shit clown could collapse the whole country which would take the decision to blow $700 on a reactive load box out of my hands, you know?
Anyway, here’s a video that I can drool over as I watch it over and over again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyZYV6swW-c
*Slight exaggeration
☭ People's Republic of China investment group
Everything is assembled and working as intended now. I'm quite happy with the result, especially with the 3D-printed "case". I took a picture with the thermal imaging camera, the tube temperatures look quite high with over 160 °C, but this is normal for this kind of tube
