Dirt Review: Blackstone Appliances Mosfet Overdrive 2Sv3

From the maker:

Description:
Blackstone’s current standard product is a very small (4.4″x 2.4″) battery-powered floorpedal called the Mosfet Overdrive 2S. It provides two footswitchable channels, each with its own drive and level settings, and true mechanical bypass.

Where the vast majority of overdrive pedals create distortion with a pair of head-to-toe diodes, the Mosfet Overdrive instead utilizes four gain stages, each contributing a small amount of soft clipping. This avoids intermodulation and the creation of fizzy high-order harmonics, just as in the best vintage amps. Those amps sound good in large part because the distortion does not occur at just one point.

The Blackstone circuit is also unusual in that it interacts with the inductance of your guitar’s pickups to get its unique dynamic response. It is very sensitive to playing dynamics, but translates them into changes in waveform distortion, rather than passing them on as changes in output level. This gives you a greater range of expression in your picking technique, but at the same time evens out volume differences. Because the guitar’s pickups and controls are actually part of the input stage, you can get anything from a juicy, harmonic-laden lead sound to a barely-breaking twang with just the guitar’s volume control.

The Mosfet Overdrive is designed to provide these sought-after distortion characteristics entirely on its own. It is not a “boost” pedal meant to cause distortion to occur in your amp. The ideal amp to use with it is the one that best gets the clean sound that you like. The Blackstone will take it from there.

Specs
Controls:
Bypass footswitch
Channel footswitch
Pilot light
(red or amber to indicate channel, off to indicate bypass)
“Red” channel drive adjustment
(minimum at 12:00, clockwise increase for single-coil pickups, counterclockwise for humbucking)
“Red” channel level adjustment
“Brown” channel drive adjustment
“Brown” channel level adjustment
Post-distortion EQ adjustment
(cuts midrange at 750Hz, up to 10dB)

Connectors:
Input: 1/4″ phone
Ouput: 1/4″ phone
Power: 5.5 x 2.1mm barrel jack, center negative

Power:
one 9V battery, alkaline recommended
or 9VDC AC adapter (not supplied)
Power consumption: ~ 17 mA

Internal adjustments:
Stage 2 Gain, Stage 2 Treble
(adj. w/jeweler’s screwdriver)

Bypass switching:
True mechanical bypass

User-replaceable components:
Socket-mounted capacitor that limits output presence
Socket-mounted capacitor that tunes Red Channel bass at counter-clockwise setting

Other:
Cast aluminum chassis with power-coat finish, Carling switches, FR4 (Epoxy-Fiberglass) plated-through-hole circuit boards, No electrolytic or tantalum capacitors in the signal path. Made in USA.*

Dimensions:
4.4″(112mm)W x 2.4″(61mm)D x 1.25″(32mm)H to top of enclosure, 2″(51mm) Ht