Boss DM-101 Review
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Warm analog echoes that will be recast in quite lots of voices. Immersive stereo alternatives. Cold rhythm-oriented patterns suggested outlandish riffs. Pleasing construct.
Expensive, even supposing it’s pretty priced relative to competitors.
Boss DM-101 Prolong Machine
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While you happen to study out a pedal as bristling with as many controls as Boss’s recent DM-101, that you would be in a position to in overall judge it’s digital. Nonetheless the DM-101 Prolong Machine is a correct analog, bucket-brigade lengthen. Its performance correct occurs to be enhanced by a digital mind. This mix enables familiar conveniences, treasure presets and tap tempo. Nonetheless artful application of digital regulate furthermore makes it seemingly to reshape the DM-101’s utter by adding or subtracting active BBDs or routing person BBDs and their solutions loops to varied parts in a stereo image. The ensuing palette of seemingly sounds is impressive and often addictive.
Echos Spanning Ages
Outwardly, the DM-101 is an homage to their first analog lengthen, the DM-1. And Boss did a prefer for classic-oriented stompbox aesthetes by designing the Prolong Machine around Boss’s fascinating Nineteen Seventies enclosure form. Nonetheless the ragged-school styling has perfect benefits, too. The choices are clearly labeled, and the knobs are spaced so that you would be in a position to manipulate the controls in true time diagram more effectively. It’s a pleasure to make expend of on a desktop, which extends its usefulness to the realm of production, mixing, and doing double-responsibility with keyboards and other desk-top instruments.
The controls themselves are largely easy. There is a 3-knob half that governs lengthen time, repeats (called intensity here), and an echo quantity or wet/dry combine. The opposite aspect of the unit aspects two knobs for modulation depth and rate, to boot to a variation knob that regulates a secondary characteristic particular to every of the DM-101’s 12 voices. The voices encompass six modes for mono applications and one more six for expend in stereo mode. The six mono voices provide quite lots of diversity, including a DM-2-inspired mode, one more that approximates the sound of multi-head tape delays, and a recent mode that glints with additional excessive break. Avid gamers that don’t expend stereo rigs—and it’s stable to dispute they’re a majority—will be rather of puzzled by the resolution to devote half of of the voices to stereo characteristic. Nonetheless they smooth provide varied, if less complex, textures in mono that are price exploring.
“The stereo modes abet as thickening brokers of a selection, adding animation and dimension on top of the additional girth provided by any two-amp setup.”
The closing controls and choices are equally easy to navigate. The tap division regulate supplies nine modes starting from dotted half of-convey settings to eighth-convey triplets. A 2nd push button saves the four onboard presets (expandable to 127 via MIDI), whereas an adjacent living of lights signifies the preset number or, in multi-head mode, the sample of selected heads.
The Prolong Is within the Particulars
Differences between the DM-101’s voices are easy to listen to, though on the muse the adaptations can also seem subtle. The classic mode supplies up to 1200 ms of lengthen, the expend of more of the DM-101’s eight on hand BBDs, which can also ordinarily motive some degradation in constancy. Right here the repeats are pretty warmth. Though identical lengthen instances within the classic DM-2 mode, which tops out at 300 ms and presumably uses fewer BBDs within the lengthen chain, attain sound rather thicker, richer, and rather darker. The up to date mode, which has a most of 840 ms of on hand lengthen, is considerable brighter, lending about a of the snap and cut help of a digital lengthen. In all three of the modes, the variation knob adjustments the form of the waveforms that impact up the modulation. The multi-head surroundings supplies out of the ordinary ingenious vectors thanks to the many rhythmic patterns the mode generates and the compositional and riff-writing moves it provokes. Non-linear and atmosphere modes, within the period in-between, toy with the potentialities of shorter lengthen instances.
The stereo modes work finest, finally, while you give them room to breathe, that diagram slack, astronomical, and ethereal chord progressions and quick percussive stabs. Even whereas you don’t incorporate these tactics, though, all of the stereo modes abet as thickening brokers, adding animation and dimension on top of the additional girth provided by any two-amp setup. Nonetheless of the stereo modes, twin mod and pan provide the boldest stereo outcomes. The mild generates a liquid, woozy, submarine texture that will perhaps well sound impossible recorded in stereo, whereas the pan sounds delectable and alive in even the most intimate spaces.
The Verdict
At $499, the DM-101 is a giant-mark item. There isn’t very any longer any question that the analog construct lends warmth to these echoes within the same diagram any sizable BBD-basically based mostly circuit does. And while you have in mind other analog delays with enhanced digital regulate, the EHX Deluxe Memory Man 1100-TT, for event, the DM-101’s mark would no longer seem ordinary. Whether that you would be in a position to impact the completely different the funding can also count upon the extent to which you exercise the more outlandish modes, the level to which you impact the completely different the stereo aspects, and how they fit your playing vogue.
