[Anchoret]

Originally Posted by callaway

Dude, I hope you were being sarcastic, because that was pretty insane. You make it sound like some big conspiracy or cover-up or something. Um, it's not! You can look up the datasheets to every component in every pedal. The bottom line is that there are a lot of intangibles that are impossible to describe in a datasheet.

You've just pointed out the problem in the same paragraph.

The datasheets are useless for determining the unrated secondary audio characteristics that determine how these products will sound, or the consistency of those unrated characteristics (though for specialized hi-end audio components like Burr-Brown OpAmps it may be).

And there is a "conspiracy" (as you call it) with manufacturers compulsively imposing total non-disclosure restrictions on their employees to NEVER discuss the technical details of their products (ironically, it was once my job to police and enforce this at Intel Corporation).

I'd love to talk to someone at Harman and ask, "Hey, when you guys converted the [cough!] fabulous DOD Grunge over to DigiTech SMT, how was that? Did you have to materially change the circuit? What problems were there in the changeover and how did you address them? Why do the new ones sound different? What's in that new speaker simulation? Can I see a schematic?"

You'll get dead silence. You can absolutely hear the sphincters tightening.

I went through this with some guys at Korg not long back.

So, don't tell me that the information I seek is not being withheld. It is, which is doubly ridiculous when you consider that their actual competition knows exactly what they're doing.

I guess I'll draw a line if you really want me to. I guarantee you that if you buy identical parts in through-hole and surface-mount packages and do an intelligent layout for each board, you will not tell the difference in a blind test. (By the way, surface-mount electrolytics are not very common.)

Maybe not in analog stomps, but I see a lot of them in bigger digital effects these days.

Any differences in sound that someone has attributed to through-hole vs. surface-mount are almost certainly due to comparing a vintage effect (or even something 10 or 20 years old) with a modern version that happens to use surface-mount components.

OK, so that makes you also on-record as saying all the angst and cork-sniffing over low-V through-board passives is also hogwash?

Hi-V audio applications are of course another matter.

In that case, I guarantee you that semiconductor die are vastly different between the parts, thus accounting for the difference.

I know -- classic case being the totally inconsistent JRC4558D v. the current retro-labeled JRC4558D which is constantly being pimped as "the same as the Tubescreamer's!!!" which of course it absolutely is not, the tooling for the original (crappy) chip having been scrapped by NJR a couple of decades ago.

A significant assertion I have also not been able to confirm is whether current DIP or SM OpAmp chips are now merely the same wafers in different packages.

Either way, I guarantee you will get better tone by practicing instead of fretting about this issue.

Hey, well thanks for that advice, huh?

This isn't about my own personal tone-quest, but about confirming or dismissing once and for all all the yammering tavern-chat among gristlehead gear users about SMT effects being innately inferior to the old stuff in terms of tone.

To the extent there's anything to it, I want to know what it is, where it happens and how manufacturers compensate for it. If it's total nonsense, I want to be able to say so so they'll shut up and sit down so we can move on to more edifying subjects.

This is not unknown information, it's just not accessible to consumers.