@iaresee, you are absolutely 100% incontrovertibly correct. I took a completely stock TS10 with JRC4558D op-amp and checked its match with the Valve Screamer VS9 model in the Axe FX III on FW 21.04.
(Green LED is the only thing thing non-standard in that one.)
The only meaningful difference is in the pot tapers for Level and Tone controls, where the mid position on the physical pedal is pretty much right on 4.0 in the equivalent controls for the TS-9 model. The Drive pot seems to be an exact match throughout its range. When I checked the extremes of all the controls I was expecting to be able to hear or feel
some sort of difference. Instead just found myself muttering "holy sh1t, this is absolutely uncanny!" repeatedly.
@Joe Bfstplk, yep always felt the same about the TS-10 here, and I spent an hour or 2 chasing it this morning. I used a Fender Princeton model to check the match, as I find that is pretty revealing with Drive models (and doesn't always sound all that good with them).
The guitar is a stop-tail bridge Les Paul Gold Top with OX4 P90s for similar reasons - it is capable of tones from very sweet to totally savage, and has plenty of output and brightness. On my initial runs at this I was listening through a pair of Red Sound MF10s, and managed to convince myself that I needed a high cut at about 7.7 kHz to get a match. However I also know that the MF10s tend to low-pass at around 5 kHz (much like a 4x12 cab does), so anything I was hearing was more "artefacts" rather than genuine frequency response differences.
Consequently I tried again this afternoon using a pair of RCF ART 732-A Mk4. It turned out I hadn't mapped the mid positions of the tone and level controls quite right. Once I could hear the full high frequency range (or at least of much of it as 56 year old ears can) I brought the model's tone control up a little, and the level down (hadn't figured they would probably need to be in the same position as one another initially
). Taking the low pass back up to 20 kHz no longer made any audible difference.
The only other thing I
think might make a very subtle difference is the bias point of the diodes. The stock VS9 model is set at 0.010, and it possibly feels a little closer to my TS-10 at 0.020. I say possibly, but this is when working with 2 drive tones that are beyond indistinguishable from one another audibly. It really is just a "feel" thing, and either very subtle, or completely psychosomatic on my part. Even with the diode bias set at zero, there is no way any blindfold test or comparison of clips would be able to tell the physical TS-10 pedal and the model apart.
I've built enough TS-variants in the course of my lifetime now to feel smugly assured in my position that it's all just snakeoil and component drift.
Ian, your smug self-assurance is entirely warranted. There is absolutely no point in even considering a dedicated Axe-FX TS-10 model. Even if was an exact match to one of my stock production examples, it would be completely indistinguishable from the VS9 we already have.
Liam
