Any Pod Go users here? Your thoughts on the low impedance issue?

GomezAddams

GomezAddams

Wandering and wondering
Staff member
I thought the growing reports of tone suck on the Pod Go was just people's confirmation bias at work. However, it has now been verified that the input impedance of the Go at 1KHz is about 360K which is way too low for a guitar to feed into, and certainly less than the 1M Line 6 advertises.

Your thoughts?
 
It’s all anyone’s talking about on the PG FB pages. It seems like a pretty big fuckup on Line 6’s part. OTOH, it’s not a big deal to stick a buffer in front and STFU. I haven’t noticed it personally, but I’m usually playing something with relatively hot humbuckers. I’ll have to do an A/B test with something in front and see if I hear a difference.
 
When I had mine, I never noticed any issues, and comparing patches I made that had the same amps to the Helix LT I owned at the same time, they sounded identical - I noticed absolutely no tone suck from the Pod Go. I didn't, however, ever play it with single coils.
 
I think it mainly manifests itself when playing single coils and then rolling down your guitar’s volume or the volume pedal. People say they’re losing high end, even if they have a treble bleed circuit.
 
I measured the input impedance of mine and came up with 230K Ohms at 1KHz.

Someone posted a clip of the Pod Go schematic input section of a facebook group and it clearly showed a 1nF cap shunting the input. No wonder it it kills highs. They also posted the Helix input section which was identical to the go's except no 1nF cap.

I'm trying to figure out why Yamaha would do something so absolutely boneheaded. The only reasons I can come up with:

1. There's a board layout flaw which lets high frequency noise from the digital section leak back into the input. The cap is to bypass the noise to ground. When I had my scope hooked up to the go's input, I saw quite a bit of high frequency noise, so this has some credence.

2. They wanted to audibly hobble the go slightly so as not to eat into Helix sales.

3. They knew the wireless version (not affected by tone suck) was going to eventually come out and they wanted it to sound better than the old go to drive users to it.
 
GomezAddams said:
I'm trying to figure out why Yamaha would do something so absolutely boneheaded. The only reasons I can come up with:

1. There's a board layout flaw which lets high frequency noise from the digital section leak back into the input. The cap is to bypass the noise to ground. When I had my scope hooked up to the go's input, I saw quite a bit of high frequency noise, so this has some credence.

2. They wanted to audibly hobble the go slightly so as not to eat into Helix sales.

3. They knew the wireless version (not affected by tone suck) was going to eventually come out and they wanted it to sound better than the old go to drive users to it.
Click to expand...

All of these are horrendous decisions on the part of Yamaha, regardless of which one it is.
 
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