4
Powering
Changing the battery
Changing the standard 9V battery first requires the removal of the four back corner screws of
the pedal. The battery clip is attached to the inside of the back plate - gently pull the back plate
off so as not to strain the connecting wires between the battery clip and main circuit board. After
replacing the battery, carefully place any slack in the connecting wires into the box cavity, and
replace the back plate with the four screws, taking care not to pinch the connecting wires.
Using a 9V adapter
Any standard 9V DC negative pin AC adapter for effect pedals can be used to power the Diamond
Drive. The insertion of the AC adapter plug automatically removes the internal battery from the
circuit
.
Warranty
Diamond Pedals carry a full five year warranty on registered products - make sure to send us
your warranty card! The warranty is simple - if you have a problem, call us, send us the pedal if
necessary, and we’ll make it right.
ing until either stopped, picked again, or let die out. For simplicity, we’ll call this the Sustain of
the note, we won’t worry about the mechanics of the Release action. When a note is picked, it
takes a finite amount of time for the compressor to measure the rising signal and then begin to
attenuate it once it exceeds the compressor’s threshold. If the speed of the compressor is too
fast, too much of the initial note transient may get attenuated giving a ‘lifeless’ kind of sound.
Conversely, beginning compression too long after the initial transient has begun can lead to an
uneven and unnatural note dynamic. On the release side, having a compressor that removes its
compression too quickly once the note begins to decay can lead to note ‘pumping’ or a feel of
lack of compression. Conversely, too long a time period to remove the compression can lead to
strange noise artifacts – e.g. background noise seems to rush in well after a note has finished.
Optical isolator based compression has been a desired form of compression in professional re-
cording studios for decades. The optical isolator works by shining a light of some fashion (in our
case an LED, with brightness proportional to signal strength) onto a variable resistance cadmium
sulfide photocell. The photocell itself has finite attack and decay characteristics for its resistance,
in the order of milliseconds, which turns out to be about the right time lags to provide smooth
gain adjustments and allows just about the right amount of initial signal transients through to
permit the compressed signal to ‘breathe’.
Where To Place The Compressor
The compressor should be placed either as the first effect in your effect chain or very close to
first (e.g. a clean boost could be placed effectively in front of the comp). As usual, there are no
hard and fast rules here, there are certainly interesting possibilities in putting the compressor
elsewhere in the chain (e.g. by turning comp to minimum, you could use the pedal as an EQ af-
ter a distortion pedal). If you use the compressor frequently in front of a high gain device like a
distortion pedal, you may want to enable the internal hi-cut filter by setting its jumper to the on
position (see description in ‘Switches’ section above).