OK I just had an hour - pushing my luck volume wise despite smaller amps - and ran the three triple tranny Solas to see how they went - can't put any sound up like Philips nice clip but can definitely make a few hopefully helpful comments.
So as you can see there's the initial long board OC84 then the short circuit board OC75 Blue Meanie and finally the OC82D Green Bastard. I didn't bother with the two transistor models.
I swapped from my earlier white '62 strat to a later '65 SB with nice grey backed pickups - didn't get much with the Tele or for that matter the AC10's as it's a bit too late and I've got the neighbours from hell.
So I used the fawn AC4 at the left, itself a particularly nice sounding amp. Setting at around two thirds to avoid either screwing up the speaker or end up with too much feedback when maxing the pedals, I tried all the pedals in turn having made sure all had fresh batteries.
As per my earlier comments, the expected Hifi aspect of the green jackets was immediately obvious as was the fact that the latest model had a fair bit less overall output - to qualify that it was still multiples of the amps clean volume but to match all three pedals whilst having all of their attack controls dimed I had to set the level controls at around the vertical or 12 o'clock on the dial on the OC84 and OC75 pedals.
No doubt at all on that. I have the two inputs on all my Voxes set for high and low input and found exactly the same when swapping between amp inputs.
NOT that overall volume will disappoint on the latest pedal - not at all - just there's a noticeable difference. I then tried different pickups and found the output differential the same across the board.
Man I'd forgotten just how much hair the Blue Meanie had, or the earlier grey version come to that but the short board is a different kind of beast in many ways.
So as I mentioned in my first post I concentrated on the subtler differences (not I think my wife in the kitchen at the time would have used that S word) as mentioned there's an underlying clarity pretty much throughout on the green pedal but by no means a bad thing,mothers definitely no shortage of dirt on hand (as Philip showed) but it's dirt of a different nature - maybe the kind of dirt that's got sparkly stuff woven into it - yes that's a reasonable way to put it - a really nice sparkling character underlying the bucketloads of dirt otherwise available. I decided to see if there was any cleanup from the guitar and although it's by no means total it's definitely there unlike the other two pedals which are much more spot on for the original long board Vox or Short Board Sola Mk2 TB's. So a nice little option for some rhythm work without messing around on the floor or at the amp.
Then without altering the amp output or pedal level I pretty much just ran through every pickup at different but matching levels on the attack control. I found that the green jackets pulled back a little quicker than either of the other two ie that by around the midday / halfway level, the new pedal was adding some grit but running short on fuzz whereas the others were still pushing out a decent amount of filth rather than the subtler but extremely useable greenies output. Pulling the attack almost all the way down acted as expected, the older two pedals - maybe the Meanie in particular were still fuzzing albeit in a far gentler way. The Meanie absolutely roared by comparison when flat out - very unruly and I'd worried I might have popped the speaker unless I cut back some and the grey wasn't that far away from the Blue
Now all this might sound like I'm coming down some on the newest member and it's absolutely not where I mean to leave people, the pedal is quite glorious but it does play differently from its predecessors. OK maybe P90's or Humbuckers would have reacted differently but the little input mod that JC does on my small Voxes (keeping one socket at 220 and dropping the other to - 48 is it? I forget) but it does mean that a single coil being run into a lower impedance input can give a hell of a lot more than normal effectively pushing the amp a lot harder so more like say a humbucker.
I couldn't resist cranking my little amp and running some single string riffs with the pedals also fully cranked (undoubtedly risking that precious - and bloody hard to replace - little 8 inch Elac) and pushing a little Voodoo Chile / Hey Joe through felt bloody marvellous. OK the Green B wasn't feeding back to the same extent as the Meanie or grey but it wasn't giving much away believe me!!
The attack "ramp" for want of a better word is simply an altogether subtler thing on the green pedal than either of the others reflecting the "Hifi" definition that I believe I first heard applied to the 82D's by David himself - I'm sure he could pitch in and put it far better than I'm doing (as in digging myself into a hole a bit) I will definitely be looking to put a treble booster into the mix next time I run them but I'm pretty confident that the underlying sparkle will remain no matter.
I was just re reading this before submitting and it occurred to me that another way of looking at what I trying to describe might be by considering the output as if there already was a treble boost in the mix, or a Klon or something that just sparkled things up some.. Very impressive.
I'm fortunate in having put together a pretty nice selection of original Tonebender - and other fuzzes - and can't quite find an oldie that I could compare it to as I'm unaware of those 82D's being used early on - even the 81D's didn't come in until towards the end of the sixties so I would have to say that Dave has managed to take a wonderful circuit and using both these transistors and his own mad skills, taken the dear old Tonebender into the modern day, probably where it would have ended had it not had a good long sleep through the 80's onwards until the last decade or so. Quite an achievement really, like dropping a really decent sounding mk2 into a Tardis and bringing it into the next millennium.
Cheers