JHS Pedals Colour Box V2 Preamp / EQ

Beautiful sound but incredibly noisy

This might be the noisiest pedal (or any piece of studio gear) I’ve ever used.

I was going to use it as preamp for bass and vocals and the distortion it provides is really great but all the recordings are pretty unusable because of the hiss from this thing.

I am aware that in the end it probably is a problem with electrical instalation at my flat but I can’t do anything about this. I was trying to isolate this pedal, disconnected basically every other piece of equipment I have save for mixer and could confirm it is noisy on its own.

I have other pedals among them some fuzzes and when they’re engaged the amount of noise is minimal and doesn’t really impact my recordings. I am using power supply with isolated outputs (Cioks DC10) but also tried other supplies that are plugged directly into the wall and the only thing that changed was the frequency of the noise.

I am dissappointed in this pedal and unfortunately I kept it for too long and cannot return it now. I want to chase this sound so I’m going to sell it and probably order JHS Crayon which hopefully will get close to the sound of Colour box without all the noise

Good stuff

Have received the Colour Box V2 some days ago and have tried it out with my guitar for now. The clean pre-amp sounds as well as OD to Fuzz settings are really good and take you from. Looking forward to use the box in studio settings now for Bass and Keys.

The build quality is impeccable and 4 year guarantee through the EU distributor is a plus.

Not for me

Five days after receipt, it returns to the sender. I am do not understand the hype around this one. The sound is far from great and hard to setup. Lot of buzz in many positions...

Good stuff

Controversially used first in chain and with a Roland JC