Maxon Overdrive Pro OD820 

The Maxon OD820 is an overdrive for the professional. It creates an expressive guitar tone that reacts to your fingering and picking touch, making the best use of the guitar and amplifier’s character. It also serves as a gain booster to naturally turn up the output level without changing the original guitar tone.

• Clean Booster /Overdrive designed specifically for tube amps
• Like a Klon with a fuller frequency response and less noise
• Extremely responsive to fingering and picking touch
• Dual-purpose Drive control with Clean Blend function
• 18-volt operation for additional headroom (powers off 9 VDC)
• Low impedance, Mechanical Bypass Switching

With plenty of gain, a super-musical tone circuit, and transparency rarely found in a pedal, the OD820 takes Maxon’s legendary 808 circuit and launches it into the 21st century.

The OD820’s voltage doubling circuit adds gain, girth and grit without desecrating your existing tone.  Imagine the classic 808 sound with more output, more bottom, and more drive and you’ve pretty much summed up the 820’s sound.

The circuit’s additional headroom gives your playing a fluid, effortless feel. Notes jump off the fretboard with a noticeable yet controlled sustain.  Though capable of heavier-than-usual overdrive, the OD820’s dynamic response is amazing and the pedal cleans up beautifully by rolling back your guitar’s volume control.

The dual-ganged Drive pot blends clean and dirty tones, creating stunning clean solo boosts at lower settings and a buttery, light overdrive at high noon.  Max it out for a full-bodied overdrive that’s saucy and saturated while still retaining clarity and openness.

The Maxon OD820 – the quest for the ultimate overdrive ends here.

The OD820 shares many similarities with the fabled Klon Centaur, but at a fraction of the cost.

Tech Talk:

The OD820 circuit is basically a hot-rodded 808 with a few special tricks.

After a JFET input buffer, the signal is sent to a dual-gang Drive pot. It then splits between a clean gain stage and the overdrive stage.  As the Drive knob is turned up, more signal is sent to the overdrive stage while the drive of this stage is also turned up.

The OD820 features a standard 808-style tone control.  However, the entire pedal is running at 18 volts via an internal voltage doubler that bumps up the clean headroom and provides a greater output and fuller frequency response than the typical 808 circuit – in other words, no midrange spike!

Even though the 820 circuit is running at 18 volts, it powers up off standard 9 VDC via battery or a standard external power adaptor.

Controls

1 DRIVE

Combines functions of Clean Booster and Overdrive by using a Dual-unit potentiometer.

At zero (complete counterclockwise position), there is no distortion and pure, clean signal is processed through Tone and Level sections of the pedal. As the knob is rotated clockwise, distortion is blended in against the clean signal until, at full clockwise position, the signal is completely distorted. So, at 12 o’clock position, the signal is 50% clean and 50% distorted.

2 TONE

Controls the effect’s tone. Rotate this volume clockwise to emphasize middle and high tone.

3 LEVEL

Controls output level of effected tone. Typically output levels of both normal tone and effected tone should be adjusted to equal levels.

4 DC INPUT

(power input jack)
A jack to connect AC adaptor.

Set the amplifier’s volume to the minimum before connecting AC adaptor to OD820 in order not to damage other connected equipment.

5 NORMAL/EFFECT(normal/effect switch)

Switch for effect on/off. Stepping on this switch alternately turns effects on (LED on) and off (LED off).

6 INDICATOR(LED indicator).

It lights on when effects are on and lights off when effects are off.
※It also indicates battery condition.

LED light indicates the battery is low or not in- stalled. In that case unscrew four screws on the bottom cover and replace the battery.

7 INSTRUMENT (input jack)

Input jack to connect to the output of the guitar, other effects, or related equipment. The product automatically turns on when you put a plug into this jack. Pull out the plug when not in use.

8 AMPLIFIER (output jack)

Output jack to connect to the input of an amplifier or other effects.

You can see a demo of the Maxon OD820 here .

Requires 9V DC battery or centre negative supply. Current Consumption: 19 mA (10 VDC)