Joe Perkins's video: Boss TB-2w Williams Professional MkII OC81D How Do They Compare

A few weeks back, I showed you the legendary - and somewhat infamous - Boss TB-2w...a highly sought after Tonebender MkII circuit put out in collaboration with the original manufacturer, Sola Sound. It was a very popular video, with a lot of big opinions down in the comments section! But in the back of my mind, I knew I was mentally comparing it to my favourite MkII-type circuit, made by Williams Audio (and coincidentally, it was Nick Williams himself who leant me his personal TB-2w to make a video with). So before I sent it back down to him, I wanted to directly compare the two - for my own interest, if nothing else, but as always I brought the camera along for the ride. Internally, they're both fairly different - the Williams being made with the OG transistors (Mullard OC81D) and the Boss being made with some lesser-known NOS germanium transistors; the Boss is entirely (apart from the transistors) surface mount, whereas the Williams uses vintage through-hole components; and the Boss contains some fancy trickery to run at different voltages and use different types of bypass, which the Williams (and indeed the originals) doesn't have. But essentially, they're going after the same thing. Here is the link to the Gray Bench Electronics TB-2w teardown video I show a few clips from: https://youtu.be/vLS5qXptvCs?si=8kBkRIo_630UkEGa I kept the test as fair as possible - level and gain matching the two pedals, and isolating them in true bypass loops so that they were both being fed exactly the same signal. And I then ran them into two very different amplifiers - and, one was set clean, the other was set crunchy. So, we could really see how these two compare with a wide variety of variables. What do you think? Which do you prefer? Is the Waza worth the (used) premium? Comment below! Guitars: - Mike McGuire T-Style w/ Don Mare Nancy & Ron Ellis MidTall - Corsa Manalishi w/ ThroBak SLE-101 PAFs Amps: - Dr Z Mazerati V2 - Dr Z Z-Master Mazerati running into a Zilla Studio Pro 2x12 cabinet loaded with Celestion AlNiCo Silver 100 & G12M Heritage Greenback speakers. Z-Master is a 3x10 combo. Amps recorded with Aston Spirit Condenser, '70s Sennheiser MD441 and sE RNR1 ribbon mics, with a Schoeps CMC6 room mic. 0:00 Intro 7:51 Single Coils 12:50 Humbuckers 17:53 Outro jp@joeperkins.co.uk Vector images by freepik.com