OD pedals in front of Mark V 25 causing tone suck?

[Bigmuff]

I swear I'm loosing a little high end sparkle by sticking an OD or boost in front of the amp. I A/B'd it several times until I could no longer trust my ears, but I'm certain the pedal is generating a bit of tone suck. I was mostly messing with an Xotic BB preamp, so it's not a cheap piece of crap. Normally, I have a Boss TU2 tuner at the front of the chain. The tuner is buffered, while the OD is just true bypass. I didn't try adding the tuner back into the chain because I was just playtesting the new amp. Bumping the presence seems to compensate, but I sort of feel like I shouldn't have to do that.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

[barryswanson]

Yeah I have. Anything in your signal chain is going to affect your tone. The best tone is made from a great guitar plugged into a great amp with a high quality cable. Simple as that. Anything else will take away from that magic.

 

[screamingdaisy]

It might not be the pedal. If you normally plug straight into the amp with a 20' cable, and in the process of adding the pedal you added a second 20' cable.... you now have 40' of treble bleed.

Buffering the cable with a TU-3 brings you back to 20' of treble bleed, which most people find minuscule with a decent cable.

 

[Bigmuff]

Yes, cables could be a factor. It's just that I own several amps, most of them pretty decent ones, and this is the only one where I have noticed this kind of signal degradation.

 

[elvis]

This amp may be giving you more treble or more harmonics, so the low-pass effect of the cables/pedals may be more noticeable. This is exactly why true-bypass has gone back out of fashion.

I recommend using a very good quality buffer with true-bypass effects.

 

[drs]

Tone suck? It's a different tone. That's why you added the pedal, isn't it?

 

[nathan28]

For me I own a ocd and a ep booster and they both sound terrible when I use them in front of my 25, however I never go without one in front of my Roadking, it's weird. They both change the highs drastically in the 25, it always sounds like it is too much, even when the gain is set low. The other thing that is weird is that I quit using my Roadking and only use the mark 25, as I think the high gain and crunch channels sound that much better! The cleans however I don't know which I like better.