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Why Doesn't Boss reissue the finest Chorus pedal ever made: Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble


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The reason you don't see them being remade is because those CE1 units were a Rolland made pedal with a Boss name slapped on it.

I own a 70's Rolland AS1 sustainer which was made using a similar rounded case. The circuit inside could easily fit inside one of the new boss pedals if they ever wanted to reissue it, even though it was an 18V battery only pedal.

 

Boss may have in fact reused that circuit as Phil said. The main difference between a CE1 and CE2 is the CE1 uses transistors for a bucket brigade and the CE2 uses a chip. The rest of the circuit is very similar in design. The Boss CE3 has more differences then the other two but the thing is, that doesn't necessarily make it sound different. The voicing, the delay timing, the LFO and shaping can either be the same or different.

you really just have to use have to use your ears in determining differences.

 

I will say, one difference the older CE1 has was a built in power supply vs using wall warts. I've owned many vintage effects that had built in power supplies and they typically had better sounds because they ran on higher voltages of 12 or 24V. Of course it was those same built in power supplies which often made them more susceptible to failure too. With a modern pedal you simply buy a new wall wart. The older stuff often has small and inexpensive transformers and they didn't always hold up so well in stomp boxes. I had several Maestro, Rolland, and even Electro Harmonix units fail because of their cheap power supplies. Modern Boss adaptors are one of the better made wall warts, not only because they are zero hum but they are built solid.

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The reason you don't see them being remade is because those CE1 units were a Rolland made pedal with a Boss name slapped on it.

I own a 70's Rolland AS1 sustainer which was made using a similar rounded case. The circuit inside could easily fit inside one of the new boss pedals if they ever wanted to reissue it, even though it was an 18V battery only pedal.

 

Boss may have in fact reused that circuit as Phil said. The main difference between a CE1 and CE2 is the CE1 uses transistors for a bucket brigade and the CE2 uses a chip. The rest of the circuit is very similar in design. The Boss CE3 has more differences then the other two but the thing is, that doesn't necessarily make it sound different. The voicing, the delay timing, the LFO and shaping can either be the same or different.

you really just have to use have to use your ears in determining differences.

 

I will say, one difference the older CE1 has was a built in power supply vs using wall warts. I've owned many vintage effects that had built in power supplies and they typically had better sounds because they ran on higher voltages of 12 or 24V. Of course it was those same built in power supplies which often made them more susceptible to failure too. With a modern pedal you simply buy a new wall wart. The older stuff often has small and inexpensive transformers and they didn't always hold up so well in stomp boxes. I had several Maestro, Rolland, and even Electro Harmonix units fail because of their cheap power supplies. Modern Boss adaptors are one of the better made wall warts, not only because they are zero hum but they are built solid.

 

With all due respect, the CE1 uses a Panasonic MN3002 512-stage single bucket brigade chip, not a discrete, transistor-implemented bucket-brigade. Granted, the internals of any BBD is basically a chain of clocked transistors passing the sampled voltage level along from one capacitor to another (the chip-implementation/definition of a bucket brigade). That's the same be it an old Panasonic chip, one of the Reticon SAD series, or the current runs of Cool Audio chips.

 

RE the internal power supply : another reason they could sound better with an internal transformer/rectifier/filter (aka power supply) is that the inductance of the long, stringy power-cable between an external PSU's filter-section and the power input to a given pedal is eliminated. While we don't usually have to consider power-distribution inductance in an 'analog' pedal, the MN3002 is chugging along at 30-40 kHz and is charging/discharging 500+ small capacitors at each clock cycle... that results in a fairly noticeable 'instantaneous' current spike on power/ground and the onboard power supply is better positioned to handle it than a supply that's down an 18 inch bit of 22 AWG spaghetti... the current spikes how as a voltage spike across that inductance. Of course, the whole thing could be handled even better if they'd add a little decoupling cap across power/ground right next to that BBD chip and it's clock-gen counterpart... but hey, it's their design, not mine.

 

Another thing to look at is the post-BBD filtering they do. The topology of the filters and how well they are tuned to the frequency/artifacts generated by the BBD clocks/activity. I personally believe the first BBD-based devices (the CE-1, the early EHX BBD boxes) probably received a lot more in-depth attention on this filtering than most (they had to, they were the first) and many of the follow-on boxes kind of re-used the same parts/values even tho they might be running a different clock frequency, or maybe had a different loading on the BBD's output... anyway, it's an area that is pretty easy to get sloppy in, and it seems like there are so many BBD-based devices we like to slam because of noise or difficulty in calibration, when it might really be due to some other aspect of the design.

 

... and so ends my monthly contribution to HC.

 

 

 

 

 

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and the correct answer is that they do not have the legal right to manufacture someone else's chorus design...sorry, the CE-1 was a great early effort, my Boss multi-fx pedal from the late 80s came with a CE-1 circuit, so I am familiar with the capabilities, and I still use it on occasion...but it is not the be-all and end-all...that distinction, at the moment, probably goes to [insert high end boutique manufacturer's name here].

 

Phil mentioned the WAZACraft version...according to someone I know who bought it, it hits an odd balance point between the CE-2, and the CE-1; it is neither, and yet both in many ways...but not the 'finest' ...

 

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