More Boss CS-3 mods. Replaced most all diodes with Germanium IN34As, didn’t notice really any difference. Replaced most all capacitors. I did notice that the ceramic capacitors that I pulled had values that were way off. Didn’t notice much of a difference until I stacked a Boss DS2 after it. The hiss was lowered slightly and can drive it a littler harder. Which is great because I love the DS2. My custom optical still performs cleaner as expected, but now I can run the CS-3 to get that punch that I love without the hiss and noise.

I also grabbed all the components for Boss CS-3 Services notes and noted all their original values and changes I made. I am going to order some electrolytic caps for C1 and C3 and OPA2134PA IC chip from Tayda, taydaelectronics.com, diy stompboxes recommends them. Their prices and inventory are pretty massive.


Part 2.5 Resistor swap changes
I changed all the 10k resistors with metal film ones. The resistors have a better tolerance. Can’t say it cleaned up noise, more like gave more clarity, will definitely replace the 28 remaining ones. So far so good, no dead solder joints. – After that I can try different values, maybe play with the attack resistor on the vr board a little bit, be cool if I can make it more punchy.

Part 2.75 Replaced all resistors with metallized ones, same values
Maybe a little more clarity but noise levels were not significantly improved.

Also worth of note is the pickup height on your guitar really alters the sustain and noise levels of compressor. My pickup height was too low and it grabbed more noise. I set up all my guitars at 1/16″ height on treble side and 1/8″ on bass side. I setup this height while depressing last fret. If both sides were set to same height, it sounds muddy to me, with bass strings dominating.

Way more headroom now and I can stack a compressor, overdrive and DS-2 distortion now without hiss. For humbuckers it is totally usable and improved noise with single coils, but for single coils the optical compressor is still has lower noise.

Overall I’m really happy with it now. The noise is tamed and I can now have 3 levels of gain staging before going to amp and the attack makes my single notes more articulated and punchy. The compressor alone can drive the amp a little bit when volume cranked, but no so much when stacking DS-2 distortion. But that may an issue solely on the DS2 noise, which I’ll probably tweak next with the Wampler mods. Think this pedal will stay on my board a long time. Going to do those last two capacitor swaps and IC chip mod just for kicks. Not bad for a 58 dollar investment, now it sounds amazing. Will do part 3 when tayda shipment arrives. Cya