Product: Pro Tone Pedals BoomBox
Price Paid: UNKNOWN
Submitted
04/20/2007
at
08:02am
by
Ben
Ease of Use
:
10
Very easy to use. Three basic controls, bass, mids, treble, a level control, and a mid shift toggle.
Sound Quality
:
10
Excellent. Can really add quite a bit of bass to make a smaller amp sound bigger. Or, take it away. More useful than a 7-band EQ because you can easily dial in Fender, Vox and Marshall tones. It's not a digital modeler, it's an analog adjustable tone stack.
Reliability
:
5
Boom Box internal components don't seem that great. Not terrible, but I've seen better work.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
Overall Rating
:
1
Overall, this is a great design. Why? Because the it was actually designed by the guys at Runoffgroove.com. Before it was taken by Pro Tone and relabeled as the Boom Box, it was called the Tonemender. Check it out:
http://www.runoffgroove.com/tonemender.html
Runoffgroove provides these schematics for home hobbyeits, but has a strict policy against them being used for profit without their permission. So, the very existence of the ProTone Boom Box is, to me, a big copyright violation. While most circuits are not patented, Pro Tone could not have built this pedal without the copyrighted instructions on the Runoffgroove website. As it clearly states on the RunoffGroove website:
(c) 2001-2007, runoffgroove.com
All rights reserved
Non-commercial use only
I'm not against cloning per se, but not off a small website's copyright protected design for profit. To me, this is unethical. Pro Tone should either stop making the Boom Box or pay a good chunk of their Boom Box profits to the person who actually designed the pedal.
Kudos to Runoffgroove for providing great quality schematics and layouts for people to build (which can be built for less than $30, by the way). Shame on Pro Tone for not respecting Runoffgroove's copyright and profiting off of their work.
/Rant
