most are TB but the ones that aren’t have good buffers so i’ve heard

The ones with a 3PDT Switch are true bypass!

Touché…..and a very good point. That will teach me to try and be a smarty pants! :doh:

Now that I didn’t know.

Worse how? That doesn’t make any sense at all. The buffer must be noisier. If you plug the buffered pedal into a high gain device you will hear hiss coming through. I compared an MXR Flanger with a Stereo Chorus. The Flanger has a wire direct from input to output and it’s dead quiet. It’s not true bypass they call that hardwire bypass. The input to the circuit has a high impedance buffer which prevents the circuitry loading down the input and bleeding off top end. The Stereo chorus is a buffered bypass and has no direct wire from input to output. It’s as noisy as all hell put into the same post gain stage. You have to know how to test the effectiveness of the bypass before making random statements. This is how completely incorrect thinking comes out to be used as a fact by someone else. Something isn’t right about what you’re saying. I don’t think your muff is true bypass if it’s worse than a buffered pedal. If it is true bypass you might be talking about the sound when it’s on, which is a totally different story. If it’s on it’s not bypassed so it could be worse and that I could believe. Or you may be talking about the loss of treble due to not having any input buffering between a guitar cable, the pedal, and another guitar cable. In that case the buffer would improve things noticably. However, the actual quality of the bypassed signal isn’t the reason you are noticing an effect.

In my simplest setup I use a Boss NS-2 and put all the true bypass pedals into it’s send/return loop. Then you have buffering on the cable from the guitar to the pedals input, and then more buffereing from the pedal to drive the cable from the pedal to the amp. That is ALL you need and you will never get any better sound by using any other pedals with buffers over all true bypass pedals. That’s my opinion because that is a fact. It’s not a question of belief it actually is the case. It’s not open to discussion. True bypass doesn’t color your tone, that is not open for debate.

I don’t know the age of his pedal, but the earliest bypass circuits used a single pole double throw switch. When the input was toggled directly to the output, it was still connected to the front of the effects circuit which would still load the pickups. Some people refer to this as “true” bypass because the effects circuit is being bypassed and there is a direct connection from input to output, but obviously the tone is still impacted by the load of the bypassed circuit.

Later, they used double pole double pole switches to completely disengage the effects circuitry which does remove the load of the circuit when it’s bypassed, but some of the early DPDT switches were designed for high amperage high voltage appliances, not for audio circuits. Some of those old DPDT switches have very high capacitance themselves so even with the circuit completely disengaged they could color the tone.

I totally agree with what you’re saying with respect to well designed true bypass using high quality audio components, but there are still a lot of early pedals out there that people are THINKING are true bypass and might even be true bypass, but using low quality components and those might still suck tone.

Also, not all buffered bypass circuits are equal. A well designed buffered bypass using quality components can be a thing of beauty. I think if you compare MODERN true bypass circuits to the latest buffered bypass circuits, you might find less of a difference in tone quality. With some modern pedals like the EHX Soul Food that have an internally switchable buffered/TBP output, I think the choice of buffer vs. no buffer comes down to where the pedal is in the signal chain, the presence of other buffered pedals, active vs. passive pickups, etc, rather than the tone of the bypassed effect. I haven’t seen this demo done, but I’ll bet that you’d be hard pressed to hear a difference between the buffered output of the Soul Food and the unbuffered output in a blind A/B test if that was the only effect on the line.