trouble understanding pedals

[Parameswara]

hey,i gonna buy a pedal soon,i've been looking through some magazines,websites and a couple of pedals drove my attention but there is something that i can't understand even as i read some of your thread in soft about pedals.
Can any one explain to me what
is a true bypass and passive bypass ?

 

[brundisium]

just imho,

settle for what you can hear and what you want for the pedal. The many other questions will slowly make sense after playing and hearing something by yourself instead of reading too much and not playing of the real thing.

As for the bypass issue, if you like to know, maybe can do a search in the forum here or google it. The answer all out there

more than often, the bypass issue wasn'nt something noticeble to some until reading in effect forums and all the paranoid behaviour start.

 

[theblueark]

True bypass is when your input is directly wired to your output, with no other connections to them.

Buffered bypass is when your input is connected through transistors to the output, with attempts to make it sound exactly the same.

Buffered bypass will sometimes noticably suck off a bit of high end. On cheaper amps you probably won't hear the difference. One or two buffers usually isn't that bad either. But when you connect a lot of buffers together the tone suck usually gets quite noticable. Especially badly designed buffers.

Another thing with buffers is they don't work well with many fuzz pedals like the fuzz face. The fuzz face has a low impedence input and if you place a buffer before it, the tone is usually very bad. Fuzz faces usually have to be first in your chain.

The advantage of buffers is that it allows your signal to be driven through a long cable without signal degradation.

The arguement of buffered vs true bypass is still an ongoing controvesial debate with big players on both sides of the arguement.