What is the difference between "true bypass" and "buffered" pedals?

 

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 it's actually "true bypass", then that means that the wires from the input get shorted to the output when you shut the pedal off - bypassing the pedal entirely. In reality, this has some ramifications and probably isn't really true. Firstly, it's very difficult if not impossible to do this without generating some noise. Think about unplugging your guitar and moving the input to the next pedal. You'd probably make some kind of a 'pop' noise. The way they are most likely doing this then, is by using what's called a "unity gain amplifier", which is an amplifier that doesn't amplify, but just passes the signal through it. If you're using one of these, then it's possible to soft-switch between the "on" state of the pedal and the "off state" without generating any annoying "pop" sounds. 

A "buffered" pedal has some kind of gain associated with the output. The signal level that comes out of the pedal is amplified. The reason you might want this is to overcome any signal loss in your pedal chain that might come from cable connections, or cable length loss. 

So really, the only difference between these two ideas is whether or not the signal is 'boosted' before it leaves the pedal. How much that boost happens to be tells you whether the pedal is buffered or if it's considered "true bypass". If you're only running one pedal, it's tough to imagine if it matters at all which type of pedal you choose. If you're running a bunch of pedals, you probably want a mixture of the two but probably not all of either one. If it's a 'boost' pedal, you almost certainly want a buffered pedal.