Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box, based on the legendary Bixonic Expandora EXP-2000 will offer you various sounds with just a 'flick' on the switches. It's designed to capture all of the dynamics from the guitar player, in order to reflect them into your lovely tube amplifier. These dynamics maintain preserved by a special part of the circuit, an expander. In short: when you play hardly, you're signal will be very distorted. When you play softly, you'll almost achieve a clean, non-affected sound. An advantage with this pedal is that the switches are located on the outside of the pedal, so you can instantly change your sound without getting a screwdriver.

Baml – electronics

Pandora’s Box V1

Dear musician,

You’ve just enriched your pedal collection with a crunch-overdrive-distortion-fuzz device which works best on a standard 9V power supply. Pandora’s Box will offer you various sounds with just a ‘flick’ on the switches. It’s designed to capture all of the dynamics from the guitar player, in order to reflect them into your lovely tube amplifier. These dynamics maintain preserved by a special part of the circuit, an expander. In short: when you play hardly, you’re signal will be very distorted. When you play softly, you’ll almost achieve a clean, non-affected sound. Enough “marketese”, lets go over to the controls.

***OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS***

Volume – Sets the output level of the pedal.

Gain - Lets you dial in how hard you want to push the pedal, thus setting                the amount of distortion.

Tone – Provides a range of sounds from slightly bassy to highly trebly sounds.

Upper switches – These switches allow you to achieve a crunch (picture 1), an overdrive (piture 2), a distortion (picture 3) or a ‘forbidden’ fuzz setting (picture 4).

Middle switch – Lets you select between different types of clipping diodes, for various types of sounds. The pedal is equipped with two LED’s (switch is up) and two silicon diodes (switch is down). The LED’s (which are red), give you a hard not too distorted sound, while the silicon diodes (a combination of a 1N4148 and a Russian diode) deliver you smooth, creamy distortion. All the diodes are interchangeable, so you can create “your” sound. In order to let you have even more sound types, the pedal comes with extra diodes. These diodes include: two germanium diodes (1N34A), one  silicon diode (1N4148) and two schottky diodes (BAT42). All combinations are possible; one diode or even no diodes (this will give you a clean boost in the crunch and overdrive setting when the gain is set not too high). When you’re going to swap out diodes, be carefull you don’t put too much force on the diode. If you do so the solder joints eventually will break. But there’s a very easy way to safely remove the diodes; just take some flat nose pliers and grip the “diode socket”. Now you can easily and safely move the diodes. You also want to make sure that the anode and cathode of the diodes are placed in opposite direction. The cathode of an LED is recognizable by its flat side (just above the connections), while the cathode of silicon, germanium and schottky diodes is recognizable by its black band.

IC swap – Standard, the pedal is equipped with a JRC4559D and two LM308N’s. But these IC’s can all be replaced by variants for different sounds. The JRC4559D IC can be swapped out for a LM1458, a 4558, OPA2134, RC4580, TL072, TL082 and other 4559 IC types. The LM308N can be swapped out for a OP07, TL070 and other LM 308 IC types.


Check also this vid, where PDB and the EXP-2000 are compared;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niHI3P78gy0

Orders @ baml.effects@gmail.com