spantini
COO of me, inc.
I've been looking for a Boss CS-2 or CS-3 pedal for less than $50 for awhile. Then @ashcat_lt tipped me off to the Behringer CS400 - a fair clone of the CS-3 at a fraction of the price. So I thought WTH and bought one. It works and sounds good right out of the box, though my Jazz bass, who's PUs make zero noise, do emit a tiny bit of that single-coil hum when run through the CS400 - very faint. It disappears when I rotate the guitar. Other than that, the CS400 has no noise problem (Note : Track 2 @ 1:53 has some electrical noise from a strong thunderstorm passing overhead)
I like using a sustain pedal for live work, so this is mainly concerned with that sustain feature.
I recorded four bass tracks with a USA Fender Jazz :
Track 1 : Dry No Pedal
Track 2 : Plugged into pedal - pedal OFF
Track 3 : Plugged into pedal - pedal ON - Level=1 O'Clock Tone=0 Attack=0 Sustain=2 O'Clock
Track 4 : Duplicate of Track 1 - Added Reaper's ReaComp
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ReaComp settings
Threshold 30.8
Attack 3.0ms
Release 100ms
Ratio 4:1
Dry=inf
Wet= -4.1
The rest default. Without a lot of fine tuning, Track 4 with ReaComp's sustain is very much like that of Track 3. I have no idea what fixed threshold the CS400 uses. I just twiddled ReaComp's knobs until I got a close match on sustain. Track 3 looks like smooth compression and the sustain is good. Track 2, plugged into pedal - pedal OFF - definitely boosted the gain but added no compression, more like normalization.
A lot of reviews complained of this pedal generating lots of noise. More reviews complained of poor quality, mainly due to some kind of major problem like it just stopped working altogether. So far, this seems as good as the Boss CS-3 in all areas. Only time will tell, I hope it lasts more than 1 year anyway.
I like using a sustain pedal for live work, so this is mainly concerned with that sustain feature.
I recorded four bass tracks with a USA Fender Jazz :
Track 1 : Dry No Pedal
Track 2 : Plugged into pedal - pedal OFF
Track 3 : Plugged into pedal - pedal ON - Level=1 O'Clock Tone=0 Attack=0 Sustain=2 O'Clock
Track 4 : Duplicate of Track 1 - Added Reaper's ReaComp
---------
ReaComp settings
Threshold 30.8
Attack 3.0ms
Release 100ms
Ratio 4:1
Dry=inf
Wet= -4.1
The rest default. Without a lot of fine tuning, Track 4 with ReaComp's sustain is very much like that of Track 3. I have no idea what fixed threshold the CS400 uses. I just twiddled ReaComp's knobs until I got a close match on sustain. Track 3 looks like smooth compression and the sustain is good. Track 2, plugged into pedal - pedal OFF - definitely boosted the gain but added no compression, more like normalization.
A lot of reviews complained of this pedal generating lots of noise. More reviews complained of poor quality, mainly due to some kind of major problem like it just stopped working altogether. So far, this seems as good as the Boss CS-3 in all areas. Only time will tell, I hope it lasts more than 1 year anyway.
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