What's the current state of the 3PDT footswitch?

[trjones1]

I haven't bought footswitches in a while and now when I go to Pedal Parts Plus (my trusty supplier in the past), I see that they don't have the ones I like and have found most reliable, the ones with a dob of the red goopy stuff at the base of each of the solder pins. In fact, I can't find this kind anywhere anymore.  I looked at the store here and I don't even see any footswitches being sold.

So where are people getting footswitches from these days?  How is the reliability?  I've had bad luck buying blue switches off of ebay, and most retailers I see are selling the same ones you get on there.  

[Kipper4]

I usually get them from tayda or more recently of ebay.
Got lucky last time and bought 10 for eleven quid.

[garcho]

really stupid name for a (web)store but this guy has good stuff:

BLMS

[R.G.]

(1) Supply problems often motivate professionals to design newer and better ways to do things.

(2) True bypass is a solution to a problem that pedals no longer have.

(3) Think.

[karbomusic]

(2) True bypass is a solution to a problem that pedals no longer have.

(3) Think.

I have an academic question on this since #3 makes me reconsider #2. I use TB (not religiously, but often) for a few reasons... If I lose power, I don't lose the signal to the amp, just hit bypass. I don't have to worry about dynamic range either other than when the effect is engaged (nitpicking rarity I know but simplicity is king in my simple world). It's less to worry about and simpler, more than it is the normal "true bypass" reasoning. I'd probably do more buffered bypass if it weren't for this and the added complexity, so the question is what am I missing?

To the OP, I tend to get the highest quality I can at a good price. Small Bear and BLMS are good best I can tell. I tend to favor expense over stuff breaking because the extra $1 or two paid is much less than the aggravation of something breaking at inopportune times and the labor to fix it far exceeds that extra parts expense. Not that you don't feel the same way, just mentioning.

[midwayfair]

(2) True bypass is a solution to a problem that pedals no longer have.

(3) Think.

I have an academic question on this since #3 makes me reconsider #2. I use TB (not religiously, but often) for a few reasons... If I lose power, I don't lose the signal to the amp, just hit bypass. I don't have to worry about dynamic range either other than when the effect is engaged (nitpicking rarity I know but simplicity is king in my simple world). It's less to worry about and simpler, more than it is the normal "true bypass" reasoning. I'd probably do more buffered bypass if it weren't for this and the added complexity, so the question is what am I missing?

To the OP, I tend to get the highest quality I can at a good price. Small Bear and BLMS are good best I can tell. I tend to favor expense over stuff breaking because the extra $1 or two paid is much less than the aggravation of something breaking at inopportune times and the labor to fix it far exceeds that extra parts expense. Not that you don't feel the same way, just mentioning.

My two favorite bypasses, the Millennium and the optotron (Voodoo labs) still bypass the signal with no power. I believe the Clinton bypass will also fully bypass if you lose signal. Buffered bypass is another kettle of fish, but you should probably think of that more like it's two effects -- a buffer and something else -- and one of the effects isn't bypassed at all, not as an actual bypass method.

Op: BLMS has a "low-profile 3PDT" that doesn't use any epoxy; the switch contacts are held firmly in place by the mold. They take solder better than the blue switches, they're smaller, and they have slightly lighter clicking action. My complaints with them are minor -- the contacts are closer together, so they don't fit a 3PDT PCB made for the blue switches, and the holes in them are pretty small if for some reason you need to fit more than one wire in them (but you're using your in jack for star ground, right? right?) -- but they're pretty much the only 3PDT I want to use now. I get a little sinking feeling whenever I use one of the blue switches. Except Smallbear's. For some reason, those are much better made than the ones I get elsewhere, even the ones that cost similarly.

[R.G.]

I have an academic question on this since #3 makes me reconsider #2. I use TB (not religiously, but often) for a few reasons... If I lose power, I don't lose the signal to the amp, just hit bypass. I don't have to worry about dynamic range either other than when the effect is engaged (nitpicking rarity I know but simplicity is king in my simple world). It's less to worry about and simpler, more than it is the normal "true bypass" reasoning. I'd probably do more buffered bypass if it weren't for this and the added complexity, so the question is what am I missing?.

I am very glad to see you following #3. It's the most important one. I'll tell you my opinions and the answers that seem true to me, but people often come to different answers in matters of opinion. Here's what I think.

"True bypass" was done for a couple of reasons. One was that you can still get signal through with a dead battery, but I tend to rate that as a much lower priority, since you can replug two cable ends and get around that one if you're REALLY desperate. Batteries tend not to die instantly - they die with a whimper, not a bang, so you have a lot of warning. And if you don't carry spare batteries, or in fact any small, cheap part that you might need at a gig, well, that's a different and more personal problem. That one, too, is best solved by #3.  

The second one was preventing tone sucking (i.e. high frequency losses) in bypass. Early pedal designs did not have high input impedances sufficient to leave the inputs connected while in bypass without degrading the bypass sound. The really notably offenders were the Fuzz Face and the Cry Baby. Both of these load their inputs a lot, and in their original form left the guitar signal connected to the tone-sucking input when "bypassed".

True bypass was a solution to tone sucking, and that's a more pressing problem than power failures and harder to fix. Early pedals sometimes used SPDT switches for "bypass". The DPDT footswitch fixed that, because it could do true bypass - "true" in that the signal didn't touch the pedal circuits when bypassed. However, the DPDT could be used for the other screaming need, an "on" indicator light, so some manufactures went back to SPDT switching (and tone sucking!) for the signal and using the second section for a light. These pedals still did tone sucking, and so the cry went up from non-technical guitarists for "true bypassing", and the resulting schizophrenia from the conflict between no tone sucking and indicators persisted and simmered until the early 90s.

Back then I got into selling parts for pedals, and I tracked down some alternate-action push switches that could be used for 3PDT footswitching. The bad part was that the switch industry hadn't moved to Asia at the time, and they cost upwards of $20 each. That set me off on a quest to do the job better with a DPDT. About the same time, it also, unknown to me, set Mike Fuller off on getting cheaper 3PDTs custom made for footswitches. Our answers arrived at nearly the same time. Fuller got his 3PDTs made, and those grew and expanded into today's 3PDT market. The volumes for 3PDTs went up so the price went down as Asian sources came on line. I came up with the Millenium Bypass to do true bypass with an indicator with only a DPDT. Both approaches work fine and solve the problems. The Millenium saves you finding and buying a 3PDT at the cost of another transistor and a few other passive parts, the 3PDT saves you buying another transistor and a few parts and having to think about it at the cost difference between DPDT and 3PDT switches.

None of this addresses the issue that true bypass is not always silent. It often has popping issues and some of these are not soluble. There is a truly silent bypassing system, but it's not "true bypass". On the other hand, with high impedance buffers at the effect, it does not cause tone sucking even if it's not "true bypass". The quality of the bypassing is proportional to the care and skill of the designer.

There is even another bypass system that I think I invented - I called it the "Clinton Bypass", based on the idea that I don't think you can find any auditory evidence that it's not "true".   after our remarkably memetically supple president, William Jefferson Clinton. In this one you go ahead and do the non-true-bypass signal switching with an indicator light done with a DPDT, but put a JFET in series with the input to the effect and turn the JFET off  when the pedal is "bypassed". The high impedance of the off-JFET means the circuit can't tone-suck. ( Notice that in English, even a noun can be verbed.)

Dynamic range when bypassed; that's a real issue, albeit, as you say, a rare one. When signals are bigger than +/-4V peak something is going to be limited. I take comfort in knowing that tube amps are deeply into input clipping when the signal at the input jack is bigger than the static bias point of a 12AX7 in self-bias, typically about 1.2 - 1.4V peak for most triode input circuits. But there are even rarer circumstances where signals bigger than about 4V peak could make a difference.

As for complexity being an issue, yes, that's real. I personally have been willing to pay in terms of complexity to get lower price and more reliability, but that is my personal tradeoff. Complexity is something that can be handled, especially in a situation where you can tinker some circuit into working, and if you understand how it works, nail it down so that you can make it work that same, albeit more complex, way every time.

I can feel the people reading this thinking "but wait! More complex is less reliable! That doesn't work!" Well, maybe. Mechanical things are many orders of magnitude less reliable than electronic things when they are doing the same job. A mechanical switch simply IS going to fail; the only question is when. An electronic switching circuit will eventually fail, too, but it's expected time to failure may well be longer than a human lifetime if the design is done well. Electronic complexity replacing mechanical devices is a good tradeoff to get better reliability in general. So supplanting a mechanical device that gets stepped on by some electronic circuitry may well increase reliability if it does not also introduce wiring and connector issues that are what make electronics have a reputation for being fragile.

I don't know that you're missing anything. We just take the same set of facts and come to different conclusions. If your tradeoff is that you'd rather deal with running more wires to a more complex mechanical switch, that works. My tradeoff is that I would prefer to have some more electronics if it means I get lower overall cost and have to run fewer wires, especially to a mechanical device, like a multisection switch.

But I do think that true bypass was adopted to solve problems that we either no longer have or don't have to have, as we have arguably cheaper and more reliable ways to solve them.

To the OP, I tend to get the highest quality I can at a good price. Small Bear and BLMS are good best I can tell. I tend to favor expense over stuff breaking because the extra $1 or two paid is much less than the aggravation of something breaking at inopportune times and the labor to fix it far exceeds that extra parts expense. Not that you don't feel the same way, just mentioning.

And I agree with this entirely. However, my tradeoff is in the direction of minimizing the mechanical stuff, as I have history with the vast majority of the repairs on  pedals my employer sold with DPDT footswitches were those footswitches. Changing to electronic switching and mimimally complex high-reliability tactile dome momentary switches stopped that.

[karbomusic]

I don't know that you're missing anything. We just take the same set of facts and come to different conclusions. If your tradeoff is that you'd rather deal with running more wires to a more complex mechanical switch, that works. My tradeoff is that I would prefer to have some more electronics if it means I get lower overall cost and have to run fewer wires, especially to a mechanical device, like a multisection switch.

Thanks a million for taking the time to respond so succinctly. I'm not "all in" on either as is true for most everything I do. I feel humans always naturally want "all in" unbreakable rules to live by but we know our imperfect universe is fraught with, if not depends upon exceptions. I think you basically covered all my thoughts since I've typically been doing a little of both and always finding a balance between both worlds. 

Side note on  dynamic range... Since starting with this lovely addiction I have pretty much accounted for dynamic range end-to-end on my gig rig per design. That's wonderful but it adds the requirement that anything I now add has to be able to handle it. I intentionally want to hit the tubes hard on the amp input (I'm a huge fan of that) but I don't want much silicon that isn't designed to clip to be doing so along that path. So far I've been fairly successful since I scope everything to my spec and know what it can handle at design/build time.

Thanks again for the thoughts, helps a lot.

[karbomusic]

I believe the Clinton bypass will also fully bypass if you lose signal.

Cool, I didn't know that. Most everything I care about is gig related so if I drop a pedal power wise (adapter or battery) or the circuit just goes belly up, I like keeping the signal path. I can always address whatever post gig but not in the middle of it. My keyboard and bass players (bless their little hearts  ) spend 10% of their lives kicking, smacking, cursing, plugging/unplugging various pedals and connections in general. I swear I should start a pedal board business that does nothing but guarantee uptime and signal integrity LOL.

[Electric Warrior]

The second one was preventing tone sucking (i.e. high frequency losses) in bypass. Early pedal designs did not have high input impedances sufficient to leave the inputs connected while in bypass without degrading the bypass sound. The really notably offenders were the Fuzz Face and the Cry Baby. Both of these load their inputs a lot, and in their original form left the guitar signal connected to the tone-sucking input when "bypassed".

The Fuzz Face has always been true bypass, just like the Tone Bender MK1.5 on which it was based on.  

The way I see it, the problem you were talking about is to switch between clean and effected signals. Tone sucking bypass was a cheap solution for the problem (but manufacturers could get away with it when people were rarely using long chains of effects), true bypass a more expensive and superior one. It still solves the problem and is very simple to do. For long term reliability one needs good switches, though. I wish those old Arrow 2pdts were still available. They're quite sturdy.

[R.G.]

The Fuzz Face has always been true bypass, just like the Tone Bender MK1.5 on which it was based on. 

Doh! You're right.

The Crybaby wasn't, though. And there were some others, notably some of the early MXRs.

... if my failing brain has that right.   

[Electric Warrior]

 
Those italian wahs must have been made to a tighter budget than their british counterparts. They grey Vox Wahs were true bypass.

[trjones1]

Thanks for your thoughts R.G.  I must have read about the Clinton bypass before, but it never stuck in my brain.  I'll do some research into that.  I guess I've always stuck with the 3pdt switches because when I used to use the Millenium bypass I never found any dpdts that were noticeably more reliable or cheaper than the blue switches.  If there are solid dpdts at a reasonable price I'd be totally open to other bypasses.

[amptramp]

True bypass has some advantages and disadvantages as listed below:

Advantages

1. Negligible signal distortion in bypassed mode
2. Exact unity gain in bypassed mode
3. Negligible frequency response deterioration, connected or bypassed
4. Minimal noise addition
5. Minimal interaction with effect circuit
6. No power required for switch function
7. No other circuitry required except switch pop reduction resistors

Disadvantages

1. Expensive 3PDT alternate-action switch required
2. Introduction of switch pops unless circuit modified
3. Different behaviour depending on order of contact transfer
4. Low reliability and life of switch
5. Difficulty in adding remote switching capability
6. Cannot be initialized on turn-on
7. Advantages not necessarily applicable to delay functions

Let's take a closer look at this.  True bypass connects the output to the input in bypass mode or to the circuit output in operational mode via switch contacts that are less than one ohm in resistance.  Even the worst pedals have an input impedance of 47KΩ, so the gain would be 47000/47001 ohms or as close to unity as whoremonger is to swearing.  This resistance does not change with input or output voltage and the total capacitance within the switch and the entire effect would be equivalent to less than the capacitance of a foot of cable.  The only noise addition may come from capacitive coupling to noise sources such as LFO's and switching regulators.  Switch voltage and current limits are above anything we would use in a pedal.  If you have only a few pedals, true bypass is not that much of an advantage.  But if you have a dozen pedals in a row, the lack of distortion, low noise, unity gain and retained frequency response is worthwhile.

For battery-powered effects, even the milliamp or so devoted to electronic switching is not needed, so battery life is extended.  Nothing has to be done to the circuit that would be any different from wiring the effect in permanently except for a couple of switch pop resistors to ground from the input and output.

So why have major production manufacturers like Boss and Ibanez avoided true bypass?  Check the disadvantage column.  The 3PDT switch is used by some manufacturers and I have seen some with a very smooth feel to the switching – in $400 pedals where they could afford to specify the best and get it – that requires constant SQA (supplier quality assurance) vigilance and a premium price tag.  Otherwise, you get a switch that feels gritty in operation and has the short life and poor reliability of a low-quality item.  The prospect of warranty returns is enough to make the greater complexity of active switching acceptable.

A lot has to be specified in a switch and quite often, no guarantees can be made.  It may be desirable to have the circuit input remain grounded until the output is connected, but this cannot be guaranteed and even if the circuit behaves properly with one sequence of contact switching, the sequence is not guaranteed.  Thus, you could build a prototype and run it through all the qualifying tests needed to approve the pedal for production, and an unannounced change or random variation in switch manufacturing could suddenly inject switch pops where there were none before.  The difference in switch transfer times may be on the order of a millisecond, which puts pulses due to voltage shifts well within the audio band.  There are some simple circuit modifications used to mitigate switch pops that usually succeed, so it is not impossible – just something that needs to be taken into account in the design.  None of the comments above address this.

A mechanical switch remains in the last state it assumed, so it can come on in either position.  Electronic switching can permit the pedal to come up in a predetermined state on power application, either active or bypassed.  It is difficult to set up a 3PDT switch for remote switching (as would be used in a rack-mounted setup in a studio) without replacing the switch with a relay and setting up an alternate-action SPST switch to activate it.  This is out of the question for a battery-operated pedal since a relay coil takes continuous current.  Latching and polarized relays that need only be pulsed momentarily exist, but they were special-order items that disappeared from production long ago.

There are some functions where switching the input may not be a good idea.  If you have a pedal which features a delay, switching the input from ground may mean you have no output until the signal makes its way through the delay.  Thus. It may be a requirement to design pedals so the input is not disconnected.  Or an input ground may be a good idea to ensure you do not have to purge signals in the delay – it depends on the style of music.  Many delays have a dry output that is an undelayed version of the input, so you do not have "dead air" when the pedal is switched on.

Once you free yourself from the 3PDT switch, the choices become cheaper and more reliable.  SPDT makes for an easy design, but with a few components used to debounce the contacts, a SPST switch is usable and can be paralleled for remote switching.  This is what is used in commercial pedals.

[deadastronaut]

more recently of ebay.
Got lucky last time and bought 10 for eleven quid.

link?.

[Kipper4]

PM'ed the link

[deadastronaut]

 

[darron]

Smallbear. Their switches are the most reliable and they advise they have never changed their direct link to the supplier.

Out of the last 500 or so I've ordered I've had 0% problems. That's why I always go there instead of cheating out.

[Gus]

Something else to keep in mind with switch vs electronic switch bypassing.

The cable length from guitar to the first circuit changes, therefore the cable capacitance changes when you use a DPDT or 3PDT switch and switch the effect in and out.

The interaction between the passive guitar/bass changes.  Sometimes part of how an effect works is due to the passive guitar/bass LRC's and cable capacitance being a part of the gain setting of the circuit.  Circuits like the FF and ones that have C to B feedback/bias and minimum series input resistance.    You can make a spice model to sim this if you don't want to test it by ear.

If a buffer with a defined input resistance is the first thing after the guitar/bass cable and before and other switched circuits the guitar/bass cable buffer interaction is more consistent BUT then you loss the guitar/bass cable interaction with the following circuits.

[karbomusic]

If a buffer with a defined input resistance is the first thing after the guitar/bass cable and before and other switched circuits the guitar/bass cable buffer interaction is more consistent BUT then you loss the guitar/bass cable interaction with the following circuits.

My guitar sensitive circuits (which is 3 fuzz circuits) are first in the chain and TB so that the one engaged properly sees the guitar, next inline is a full time buffer although it does have a footswitch if I needed to disengage it for some odd reason, followed by the rest of the pedals. The exception is that I built an A/B FX loop box that inserts either 1 of the fuzz or my overdrive into the single path, it is designed obviously to also take care of that problem (who should see a buffer and who should see the guitar) while also allowing me to switch between OD and Fuzz with a single switch (yay). I'm not making a statement for or against either, just mentioning I've addressed many of the concerns above in my current setup.

Lastly, I'm not that guy who wants 20 feet of cable so I can run around, I haven't used more that 12' max between guitar and first pedal in 20 years for that very reason thusly, I really rarely if ever have any tone suck or pedal board tone issues with my rig.