# FYI: Volante is not a true stereo delay!



## JC103 (Oct 6, 2007)

Well I caved in and bought a Volante at L&M. $539CAD plus tax. First impressions are good, it is a very nice sounding delay with lots of extras. I bought it to replace my two aging Boss DD-2s that I use in stereo as a dual mono signal path. Can't save settings on those obviously! The good news is that the Volante sounds just like the DD-2s on the Drum setting. Since I am replacing a pair of DD-2s this is a good thing and makes me happy.

What doesn't make me happy is that I have only found out after buying the damn thing that it is not a true stereo delay. The analog throughput is 100% analog and true stereo. The digital delay is just BIG MONO. What I mean by BIG MONO is that the left and right inputs are summed internally to mono by the Volante and then sampled by the digital chip. You can pan the delays left and right at the output, but all the repeats/echoes are a combination of both left and right inputs. This causes major issues with chorus pedals when used in stereo, especially ones like the Boss CE-3 and DC-2W, where phase inversion is used to enhance the stereo image.

I am sure M. Hammer can explain this stuff in greater detail, but I thought I'd post here as a quick review and FYI. The Strymon manual does not explicitly explain this, as it only provides a block diagram that is open to interpretation. I emailed Strymon and they confirmed that the left and right inputs are summed to mono... which I am not impressed with because the only reason I bought the Volante was to have a true stereo delay. Now you know and can make an informed decision.


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## JC103 (Oct 6, 2007)

Other places where this is being discussed:

https://www.thegearpage.net/board/i...rymon-announcement-on-jan-10.2006632/page-114

Second to One: A word about


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## Granny Gremlin (Jun 3, 2016)

Hmmn, if that's the case then that's pretty bullshit. I would have expected better of Strymon.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Many years back, I exchanged some notes with a DSP firmware developer at Line 6 about the Echo Park. I was curious about the stereo implementation. He told me that the clean was, just like the Volante, pure analog and true stereo from in to out. But he said that when they were developing the pedal, they found it took so many more DSP clock cycles to process the wet for each channel separately, such that a fresh 9V Duracell would be drained in less than an hour. That may not seem especially relevant to pedalboard/power-brick folks, but at the time it meant that a music store clerk couldn't simply hand the pedal to a potential purchaser to try out with out having to look for a suitable adapter and outlet to plug it into, or possibly risk battery failure if they went that route. Because of current consumption, true digital stereo potentially compromised marketing. So what they did was to pool the inputs, and distribute the processed signal to the two outputs in slightly different form, as I understood. Truthfully, while many more pedals come in stereo form these days, not that many users _use_ them in stereo, and even fewer feed them a stereo signal. So what you'll see is one of the inputs labelled as being what you use for "mono". You will still get two slightly different sounds from outputs A and B, even if you only feed a single input. Is that "cheating" somehow? I don't know. It does mean, however, that reprocessing the output of A by feeding it to the B input gets you some really interesting outcomes.

I understand why some folks would like thier pedals to be true stereo throughout. But admittedly, that's the sort of thing that really requires a rack unit, in order to have fully independent processing by dual DSPs.

This is a brief sample of reprocessing that I recorded over a decade back: http://hammer.ampage.org/files/Re-echo.wma The accompanying blurb I posted was this:

"_The Line 6 Echo Park comes with two inputs and outputs. While not true stereo, the unit allows for some interesting cross-recirculation and reprocessing possibilities.

The soundclip illustrates two of the possibilities. It starts out with a short riff using the "reverse" program in the normal way. I have it panned 100% wet so you only hear the reverse. From there it switches to a re-echo whereby I plug into A, run A output back to B input, and send B output to the amp. You can hear a lovely shifting overlapping sound. Note as well that when you reverse what has already been reversed, you get it forwards again...sort of. Really interesting texture.

The second half of the sample illustrates the same once, then twice, processing of the "sweep" program. This is a program in the Echo Park that imposes a kind of wah sweep on each iteration. You'll hear it normally (again, 100% wet to emphasize the sweep), and then reprocessed. Note the lovely rhythmic emphasis feel to it. Also note that I have simply hit one note to produce all that.

Apologies for the buzzing. That's what you get when you record with single coils in front of a CRT monitor in a room with fluorescent lights. The fuzz is a Jack Orman Mos-Face; a variant of a Fuzz Face but with a mosfet transistor._"


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## zurn (Oct 21, 2009)

I understand why some folks would like thier pedals to be true stereo throughout. But admittedly said:


> http://hammer.ampage.org/files/Re-echo.wma[/URL] The accompanying blurb I posted was this:


Your link dosent work here. I have an echo park, i'll try out that trick of yours soon !


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Just go to hammer.ampage.org It`s the second item on page 1.


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## troyhead (May 23, 2014)

Thanks for the info @JC103. The Mr. Black article was enlightening (and kind of funny in a "Wow, this guy is angry" sort of way).

I've suspected the Strymon stuff has been like this for a while, so I don't think the Volante is alone. I've fed sounds to only the left channel of their pedals and still heard things come out of the right. The summed dual-mono would explain that. But as it has been the case with most of their products for years, it's really only an issue in very specific circumstances like the phase cancellation you described or studio applications. Unfortunately, I don't think you will have a different experience with a Timeline or most other delay pedals.

I get why they do this. With the dry path being in stereo, the effect works for 99% of cases. If they wanted to process each channel independently, the pedal would require more processing power, therefore cost more, and result in fewer people being able to afford these already expensive products, OR they could drastically reduce the capabilities of the pedal... all just for 1% of cases where this is a problem.

Not to minimize your problem, I'm sure it is very troubling. My issue was only a mild annoyance, but if you are getting phase cancellation then that can wreck your whole sound. However Strymon has likely been doing the same thing for almost a decade with few complaints, so it can't be a very widespread issue for most pedal owners.

In your case, does it sound drastically different if you run the chorus in mono before the delay? Or what if you broke all the rules and ran the chorus after the delay (assuming it doesn't have the same summed dual-mono config)?


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## Granny Gremlin (Jun 3, 2016)

mhammer said:


> I understand why some folks would like thier pedals to be true stereo throughout. But admittedly, that's the sort of thing that really requires a rack unit, in order to have fully independent processing by dual DSPs.


You probably don't want 'fully independant' processing though, especially for stuff like compressors, because that can skew the stereo image in unexpected and undesired ways. With reverb/delay it's a little more flexible in that regard but there either needs to be some common control (I dont mean user settings, I mean in the DSP code) to keep things from going crazy in unbalanced ways (when you don't want them to; tough balance that) or have it be 2 completely independent channels - many rack units can choose between both but in a pedal you're probably gonna have to pick one, and the independent route likely loses the feasibility study. You gotta remember, it's not just guitarists using pedals these days (though stereo/multichannel rigs are more popular, and growing as a thing); all sorts of folks from keyboard/drum machine/laptop sequencer guys to electric clarinet (I only just found out such a thing exists and, I must say, pretty cool, especially through pedals , which is surprising cuz acoustic clarinets are so , lets face it, lame), and the former at least, is going to want true stereo.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Agreed. There are plenty of instances where guitarists would like some sort of two-different-outputs, even though they intend to feed a single input signal. I think there IS some surplus value in having two inputs, but like yourself, I don't see all many instances where a guitarist would need them as a fundamental part of their rig. And that's probably why virtually all ostensibly "stereo" units flag one specific input of the two as appropriate for "mono"


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## troyhead (May 23, 2014)

mhammer said:


> Agreed. There are plenty of instances where guitarists would like some sort of two-different-outputs, even though they intend to feed a single input signal. I think there IS some surplus value in having two inputs, but like yourself, I don't see all many instances where a guitarist would need them as a fundamental part of their rig. And that's probably why virtually all ostensibly "stereo" units flag one specific input of the two as appropriate for "mono"


I think units such as the Line 6 Helix can handle the "left" and "right" channels as two independent mono channels with nothing crossing over. This will let you run your acoustic guitar and electric guitar into different inputs, process them separately, and output them to different destinations without any overlap but all inside one Helix. You could also do an electric guitar and a bass, or two electric guitars with independent processing.

I wonder if the advent of these types of effects makes people think that their other stereo pedals can do the same thing. But what they aren't considering is that the extra processing consumes effects blocks in the Helix, so you cannot do as much with each independent channel as you could with just a single instrument.

I wonder how the Helix or other big digital effects like the AxeFX work if you simply chain together a ton of stereo effects. I'm not talking about effects that will definitely sum to mono, but stereo-in/stereo-out effects. Will the "wet" portion of the stereo effect be summed dual-mono with dry through in stereo, or are they true stereo effects? Hmm...


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Given the price-point of the Helix, I suspect it is using dual DSPs, enabling the possibility of pure stereo.


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