It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Super Buffer!

[Mark Hammer]

A friend gifted me with a few new enclosures, two of which are 1590A.  Having built more things into 1590A boxes than I care to think about, I've given up on them.  Just too nerve-wracking to try and fit circuits with pots in there.

So what could I do with them?  Figured I might make a buffer box, since that only requires in/out and power jacks.  Looked through the directory of such things on my hard drive, and thought I'd give Jack Orman's "Super Buffer" a try. http://www.muzique.com/lab/superbuff.htm  Jack's circuit is ideally intended to be able to feed ultra-long cables (e.g., from stage to sound guy 30yds back from the stage at the festival) by paralleling 4 op-amp stages for a higher-current output.

Personally, the likelihood of me ever feeding a 200ft cable is lower than that of me becoming head of the Russian Politburo.  Are four paralleled op-amps necessary?  For somebody, but not for me.  So I figured a single dual op-amp would be good enough.  The one-chip circuit is actually not unlike the headphone driver circuits one can often find in mixers.  I perfed two complete circuits; one using an NE5532, and the other using an LM833.  Fit easily into the enclosure.  Jack provides a PCB layout for the 4 op-amp circuit, but I wanted something more compact, so perf was the way to go...for me.  I installed a DPDT toggle in one of them, to compare between buffered and unbuffered.

Holy moly, what a difference!  And not just for single-coils, but for humbuckers as well.  Brighter, more bite.  Even a little louder, and not just because of more treble.  The in/out toggle on one of the units I built reinforces that.  I've only tried it with small solid-state amps, so I'll have to try it with my larger tweeds and see.  I also haven't tried it out with pedals, just going straight into the amp.  But so far so good.

Thanks, Jack!  Only took me 19 years to get to it, but I'm still grateful.