Fail! The TC Electronic 3rd Dimension is not a dimension chorus!

https://youtu.be/V2Nq6mt4zaA

Well, my TC pedal arrived today, and with great anticipation I set it up to run some test sounds, with my Vox Spitfire guitar and Fender Champ amp: should have been ideal clean tones to highlight a nice dimension chorus.  But the pedal sounded awful!  I think I'll return it.  It is nothing but a conventional analogue chorus, like the Boss CE-2, but with inferior sound quality.  I have no use for a unit like this, and I won't waste my time modding it, there is no hope of ever getting the sounds I'm seeking from this circuit.  There is no magic, no trickery, TC have not somehow found a way to make one delay line sound like the two in antiphase which define the dimension effect.  It's nothing but a plain vanilla chorus, dressed up and sold as if it were a clone of the Boss Dimension-C.  It's a scam.  What a disappointment.

So.  Where does that leave us.  I really want to base my work on a unit which is still in commercial production.  The original Boss DC-2 is only available used.  Same goes for the Behringer CC300, which appears to have been a faithful clone of the DC-2, unlike the TC unit.  Nothing current from Behringer appears to have taken its place.  The current Boss DC-2W (Waza) pedal is more expensive, over $200, and given that the control buttons are now digital logic based, I'm not sure if the underlying circuit would be amenable to the mods I want to make.  The original Boss SDD-320 (Dimension-D rackmount unit) is now selling for over $1000, which is ridiculous considering what's inside.

So the main unit of interest now, to me, is the Klark Teknik BBD-320, which as far as I can tell really is a clone of the SDD-320, and not just a deceptive, lookalike scam like the TC 3rd Dimension.  The BBD-320 is selling for about $170 new, or the same price as the used DC-2 pedals.  I don't especially relish dedicating 2U of rack space to this one rather trivial solid-state effect, so I wonder how full that box really is, and what are the chances of squeezing it down to 1U, or even a smaller non-rack box.  But, looks like this may be the direction to pursue now.  I guess I'll have to start a new blog to cover this, because it's hard to change the names of these blogs once they've been established.  So this blog, concerning the TC Electronic 3rd Dimension, is now officially finished.  With annoyance!

** Well, maybe not quite... **

 


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