MusicMangle

  A very common buzz phrase you'll see while shopping for guitar pedals is the phrase 'true bypass'. All too often, it seems like people latch onto these phrases to mean things they were never meant to mean. In this case, people seem to think that the "opposite" of "true bypass" must be "false bypass", or that because this type of connection says "true", that must mean that anything that isn't "true" is false, and therefore bad. However, none of this is real. The other type of connection you can have in a guitar pedal is a "buffered output". Unfortunately, this also sounds bad to many people, probably because they've experienced "buffering" on a computer.  The truth is, you probably want both buffered and true bypass pedals in your pedalboard, and which one you choose depends on how you use them. The phrase "true bypass" is trying to tell you what happens when you turn the pedal off. If ...

"But this cable is Balanced" A "Balanced" signal is a signal that is being transmitted as 3 parts. The signal, the inverted signal, and the ground. That's why "Balanced" cables such as XLR have 3 pins. This term, however, in no way implies that the "Balanced" signal is better than the "Unbalanced" signal. The Balanced cable exists to solve the same problem the shielded cable also solves. The problem is RF interference - and the solution to RF interference is intrinsic RF noise rejection.   With a shielded cable, any RF noise present in the environment that might be induced into the cable will hit the ground shield first because the ground shield physically goes all of the way around the outside of the cable. Any signal that is RF induced into the cable will likely follow the shortest path to ground. The shortest path to ground, is the shield. That means a properly made shielded cable is effectively impervious to RF interference. In ...