Boss BD-2 clipping order

[Steben]

I wonder if anyone ever thought of decoupling the stereo pot in the BD-2, leaving the gain of the second "discrete opamp" fixed.
This is the gain stage that clips the first, since an unclipped signal of about 1.2V coming from the diode stage will throw it into clipping even at low gain settings.

This is, if the "protection" diodes of the last opamp stage don't clip first....

All in all, the BD-2 features 4 points of clipping.... high gain settings means severe wild additive clipping with the most defining element being the discrete opamps, not the diodes.

[Rob Strand]

I wonder if anyone ever thought of decoupling the stereo pot in the BD-2, leaving the gain of the second "discrete opamp" fixed.

There's two motivations for using a dual gain control:  being able to back the gain off to cleanish level through to high gain and keeping noise down.   Putting fix gain after a gain control will add noise.    The Marshall Blues Breaker etc. implements the same idea with a single pot.

Getting the magic combination of gains on those dual pot set-ups takes a lot of experimenting.  In the past I've always set-up two pots then worked out the best setting of the second pot for each position of the first pot.  Then try to come up with a scheme so a dual-gang pot gets the same result - which never works out exactly.

I guess the easy answer is try it and you will soon know where you stand, or, you might end-up liking two pots.