History
The earliest Boss product was called B-100 The Boss, released in 1977. This came with a clip-on pre-amp and a pickup to amplify acoustic guitars. At this point the Boss company had not been formed and it was still technically a Roland product.
The first proper Boss foot pedal effect, the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, was released in 1979. It was a fairly large, AC-powered unit. It is often stated as being integral to the Andy Summers chorused guitar sound, yet to this date, no verifiable evidence has emerged that he ever used the unit.
Boss's line of compact pedals began in 1978 with the release of three pedals: an overdrive pedal (OD-1), a phaser pedal (PH-1) and a parametric equalizer called the Spectrum (SP-1). The Boss DS-1 was released the next year, in 1979. Also released in this year is the T Wah (TW-1) pedal. Their first compact chorus pedal (CE-2) came the next year (1979), and their first flanger pedal (BF-2) in 1981. In 1983 Boss released the DD-2 Digital Delay, the first mass-produced digital delay in a compact pedal format. In 1992 Boss released nine new pedals, including the Turbo Distortion (DS-2). The Metal Zone (MT-2) was released in 1991. The Heavy Metal (HM-2) distortion pedal was an integral part of the guitar sound of many styles of heavy metal music ever since. The pedals all share the same 'footprint', for compatibility with pedal boards.
Boss introduced COSM (Composite Object Sound Modeling), Roland's proprietary version of digital modeling technology, into their AC-3 Acoustic Simulator pedal in 2006. Boss has since released several pedals using COSM, including the FBM-1 '59 Fender Bassman pedal and FDR-1 '65 Fender Deluxe Reverb pedal, introduced at the Winter NAMM show in January 2007.
All Boss compact pedals use a "buffered bypass" type of silent foot switching utilizing Field Effect Transistors (FETs) to avoid clicks and pops. While not "true" bypass, the buffered bypass has the advantage of preventing signal loss due to long runs of cable, while keeping original guitar tone intact.
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—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
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