A student told me original Boss DS-1 pedals are going for hundreds of dollars on Reverb.
So I had to look, it seems ridiculous. The DS-1 is probably the most ubiquitous, generic distortion pedal there is, at one point I received one as a bonus for buying something else that was only a couple hundred dollars itself; I never used it, but now I've got to go rummage around in the shed to see if I still have it.
The chip shortage is having a knock-on effect on other things in the guitar gear realm. The chip in the original DS-1 has gone out of production, and it has nothing to do with the headline news story about the actual "chip shortage". A lot of integrated chips have gone out of production before the situation occurred with the factory fire + global shut down "chip shortage", but wasn't the cause of any run on pedals except with the Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer variants.
The subtlety of the 4558 variations that were used in Tube Screamers (and clones) are ultra-cork sniffery. I've got .... 4 Tube Screamers/variations with one inside, and there would be no way I could tell if the chip was a "vintage" one or not, there are too many ancillary things going on with them in the circuit design. People compare what they say is "identical" pedals, but they haven't examined the resistor values, the input impedance, what things have drifted out of spec within a "vintage" pedal. It's not actually empirical, and yet, it's still so close that nobody will hear the difference except the cork sniffer doing the A/B test.
I guess I need to go see if I can find the pedal. I think they're ok, good all-purpose distortion pedals that will get someone by in just about any stylistic situation if need be. They tend to make everything sound similar, which could be a good or bad thing. For me, the nature of the way they compress combined with the eq makes me play things I start hearing as "Steve Vai", so I don't use them. That very thing makes them good for "fast technical playing" IMO for that reason, they help you out so to speak, in that they even out your single note playing really well while maintaining articulation. But to my ears it's Steve's sound, so I look elsewhere.
"Chip, in the 21st century a USED Boss DS-1 will sell for hundreds of dollars" - I don't know if I would have believed that 30 years ago!
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