Klon KTR

Another quick one. Another pedal that's a lot fancier than I normally get to play with. This is the reissue/sequel Klon that "inspired" the EHX Soul Food and dozens of other klones.

Not of Bill's making, but it probably helps.

The build quality is pretty high, everything is board mounted and the footswitch is on it's own small board with a ribbon cable and snap-in connectors providing strain relief. The only wires are for the battery snap. Despite the "essential" diodes, there are no exotic or outrageously expensive parts. It looks like surface mount film counts are used throughout.

 

The circuit seems to be similar to Centaur traces found online, and pretty close to the Soul Food except for the magic diodes. The 7660 doing voltage doubling and inversion seems to add a lot more ultrasonic switching noise (~26-27 kHz) to the power rails than I remember seeing in the Soul Food.

This one had a bad TL072 opamp (U2). I would guess that someone used a power supply above 9V and the charge pump supplied a voltage above +18V (the upper limit for the TL072) and popped it. The pedal works after replacing it, so an easy enough fix once the problem had been found (I just guessed when everything else around the opamp measured OK). I forgot to take many pictures of this one, the noisy one above is an "after" shot, you can tell the alignment of U2 is a little off.

Side-by-side it's very close to the Soul Food in sound. Connecting to a signal generator and scope, both can do ridiculous 25+ Vpp output with the right input settings and signals, which should overdrive the shit out of pretty much anything.