Boss SX700

Although much loved by musicians, Boss's SE50 and SE70 effects processors have now been discontinued, and the new SX700 is designed to replace them. Rob Brady decides whether the SX can follow in the footsteps of its forefathers, or whether it is destined forever to walk in their shadow...

Boss have been making effects processors in one form or another for well over a decade, from the original 'stomp boxes' and the later Micro Racks to the more recent multi‑effects processors, the more‑than‑capable SE50 and SE70. Having owned most of these, I awaited the arrival of the new Boss SX700 multi‑effects processor with interest, as it is obviously designed to fill the gap left when the well‑specified SEs were discontinued.

Judging By Appearances

As you can see from the accompanying photograph, the SX700 comes in a 1U rackmount case and sports the sort of colour scheme that wouldn't look out of place on a sports car. The layout of the front panel is similar at first glance to that on the Boss's recent GX700 guitar effects processor (reviewed in SOS June '96) — but even cursory inspection reveals that the SX700 is a very different beast.

Starting on the left of the unit, there are two rotary controls for setting input and output levels — but unfortunately no wet/dry balance control. To the right of these is the now almost mandatory 2x16‑character LCD display. Continuing right, you encounter two rows of five illuminated buttons; the bottom row of these is used to navigate around many of the SX700's more general menu pages, and contains the Exit and Write buttons.

This is where I raise my first gripe with this unit. I am fairly sure that I am not the only person who thinks that putting the Write and Exit buttons next to each other is a bad idea. In a dimly‑lit studio, you need every bit of help preventing silly mistakes which can take ages to fix, especially if you are paying for the studio time. If anyone from the Boss R&D department is reading this, please do something about it next time!

Each of the five buttons in the aforementioned top row is dedicated to a single effector (more on this term in a moment). From left to right, you have EQ, Mod (Chorus, Flanging, Pitch effects), Delay, Reverb, and RSS. "Stop right there", you should feel free to cry at this point, "RSS on a Boss multi‑effects processor for under £500?" For those of you who have missed the development of this exciting technology, read the 'RSS Enterprise' box elsewhere in this article.

To the right of the main buttons is the data entry knob, with parameter select buttons underneath. The knob is very tactile, and is a joy to use, being both 'stopped' and velocity‑sensitive. This latter feature lets you rapidly skip from working with a delay time of (say) seven or eight milliseconds, right up to over a second's worth of delay with just a speedy turn of the knob — but turning the control slowly by the same degree will only produce a very subtle change in the parameter value. Finally, on the extreme right of the front panel you encounter the Bypass, Utility, and power switches.

On the back panel are the standard compliment of three MIDI sockets, true stereo In and Out on unbalanced quarter‑inch jacks, and sockets for a control pedal (switch), an expression pedal (continuous controller), and Bypass (switch). Also on the back is a switch for setting the input/output level of operation between +4dB or ‑20dB (why not the more standard ‑10dB?). This is one area where the SX700 again scores over the older Boss units, and it comes as a pleasant surprise to find professional standards being implemented on a unit in this price bracket.

Unfortunately, following in the tradition of almost every budget effects processor, the SX700 makes use of an external power supply (or wall wart to those of us who dislike them), which is a little irksome when you find out how much spare room there is inside the SX700's case.

Effects Architecture

The basic unit of effects currency in the SX700 is an effector, to use Boss terminology. The effectors are chained together in different orders and configurations in one of 19 preset effect chains to form patches. Sadly, there is no method of creating your own chains, so the presets provided by the designers are the only way of putting the effectors together. Obviously, this is not quite as flexible as, say, the Alesis Q2's virtual patching system, but the preset chains are well thought out, and allow you to create some quite stunning results.

In all, a patch can have up to five effectors running simultaneously, but you can only have one from each effector running at once. (see the 'Effectors In Full' box for a full list). In other words, you can't have a harmoniser and a flanger running simultaneously, or chorus and phasing at the same time, as all of these are generated by the Modulation effector, which has its hands full generating one effect at a time.

Almost all of the SX700's 128 preset patches use more than one effector simultaneously, nearly all have an EQ stage, and many have an RSS element sitting on the end of the effect chain. The five illuminated direct buttons on the front panel allow you to mute each effector, so you can see what each one is contributing to the overall sound produced by the unit. The direct buttons also come into play when performing editing functions on a patch, for example, enabling you to jump from editing Chorus rate straight to the edit pages for Reverb with a single button press.

Using The Effectors

• EQ
  The SX700 always has a three‑band parametric equaliser available, no matter how many other complicated effects are running at the same time. The frequencies are split into three bands, and the upper and lower bands are switchable to either parametric or shelving operation. Each band can have up to 12dB of gain applied or removed in a very musical manner. This makes the SX700 very useful to anyone who has a simple shelving EQ section on their mixing desk and needs a little bit more control over a complex signal. The EQ section is also good for reducing hiss from a dirty input signal, or for creative use in effects chains.
• MODULATION & PITCEFFECTS
  The Modulation effects (chorus, flanging, phasing, and Leslie simulations) are just as good as those found in Roland's much more expensive — and now discontinued — SDX330 (see SOS July '94). The SX700 even manages a more than reasonable impression of the old analogue SDD320 Dimension D Chorus, much sought after by the dance fraternity.

Pitch and harmoniser effects are also controlled by the Modulation effector, so you can't have chorus/harmoniser or flanger/pitch‑shifter hybrids, which is a shame, but there have to be some limitations imposed on what is, after all, a mid‑price unit. Depending on what else is included in your effects chain, you can use either a two‑ or four‑voice pitch‑shifter from the Modulation effector. The amount of shift is adjustable over a range of plus or minus two octaves, although as with many pitch‑shifters, the usable range is much less than the theoretical maximum before audio artifacts become apparent. Generally speaking, though, the quality of the SX700's pitch‑shifters is notably better than its predecessors, the SE50 and SE70.

The harmoniser in the SX700 has the same limitation as the pitch‑shift: depending upon what other effects you have running in your chain, you can add either two‑ or four‑voice harmonies to the source signal. The harmoniser is semi‑intelligent, but you have to tell it what key the song is in — and only Major and Minor keys are supported as standard. If you are feeling adventurous, a user scale can be programmed, allowing you to create more exotic modes. The results are good compared to the competition, but you would not buy the SX700 for this feature alone.

Before moving on, there is one notable omission from the SX700's modulation section — vocoding. Some may say that the less chance people get to use a vocoder, the better, but the vocoder in the SE50 and SE70 was one of the highlights of these units, and allowed the creation of some seriously odd, interesting sounds. It's sorely missed here.

• DELAY
  If you, like me, love messing around with delay to help create riffs and grooves, then the SX700 is going to impress you for its delay facilities alone, regardless of all its other bells and whistles. The SX700 has seven types of delay effect, ranging from a simple mono delay line, passing through the mild insanity of a band‑pass delay, and off into the totally hatstand with 4‑tap delays and quad delays.

The total amount of delay available is 1400 milliseconds — so if you have a stereo delay the maximum delay is 700ms. When working with multi‑tap and quad delays, the total pool of delay is shared between each tap. In other words, you can have one tap taking 700ms, the next 300ms, and the next 300ms, but this means the final one can only have 100ms, bringing the total to 1400ms.

The SX700's delay section also has the added bonus of a very impressive tempo delay facility. This enables delays to be set up without the need for messy calculations to work out the exact delay for a given tempo. Simply tell the SX700 what interval you want the delay to be (minim, crotchet, quaver, semi‑quaver, and so on), set the sync source, and you can obtain perfect delays, every time. The sync source can vary: it can be from an internal setting (you define an exact tempo), or MIDI Clock, a control switch (you tap your foot in time), or a MIDI key (same idea as control switch, but using a MIDI keyboard or drum pad). Again, the delay section passed quality control — I was particularly pleased to note the lack of the background hiss exhibited by the SX700's Boss forebears.

• REVERB
  To be blunt, the reverbs on offer here aren't up to Lexicon PCM80 standard — there is a slightly thin and grainy tail end to longer reverb times — but the SX700 is certainly a match for anything by Alesis or Digitech. In direct comparisons, the SX700 also sounded brighter and more detailed than Boss's own RV70 (which offers similar facilities to those offered by the SX700's reverb effector). This is presumably due to the SX700's greater bit depth in its AD/DA conversion (18‑bit instead of 16‑bit).
• RSS
  This is, in my opinion, the effector that is going to generate the most interest in the SX700. The RSS effector has two main modes: it can function both as a 3D autopanner and as a fixed positioning system, placing a sound either above or below the listener anywhere in a 360° circle. Sending a hi‑hat pattern through the autopanner produces amazing results, with the sound literally moving outside the speakers' traditional sound field and back in again. The extent of the pan is subjectively different, depending on where you sit and how easily your brain is fooled. Playing exactly the same effect to a group of five people produced five different views on how well the system works — but all agreed that the sounds did distinctly move beyond the 'normal' sound field. An afternoon of experimentation revealed that high‑frequency sounds (such as hi‑hats and sequenced lines) produced the best results, but almost anything can be made to sound better by the use of a little RSS.

At first, the positioning system seemed a little bit disappointing after all the stunning results I'd had from the autopanner, but all it took was a brief glance in the MIDI programming guide (see the 'SX700 & MIDI' box for details) to start the creative juices flowing. You can control the pan position in both the horizontal and vertical plane via SysEx information, so after a few minutes setting up a mixer map in my sequencer, I had created a fully automated 3D panning system, and was able to move a sound around at will. This alone justifies the SX700's existence, as it allows almost any studio access to an effect which would, until recently, have cost thousands of pounds to create.

Summary

After using the SX700 intensively on a couple of dance remixes, I decided I would have to buy one. The SX700 has an immediacy which makes it easy to use, but despite this, it also has enough depth to keep the most ardent MIDI programmer busy for months. The sound quality is also much better than anything Boss have produced in the past — in fact I found the SX700 to be one of the sweetest‑sounding performers that I have heard at any price. In blind tests, the SX700 matched the quality of my TDM plug‑ins, as well as giving processors costing a great deal more a hard time justifying their price. And then, of course, there's the RSS facility, which really makes the SX700 stand out from a crowd of similar effects units.

Of course, I do still have a couple of points to moan about: wall warts have no place in a studio, and should be a thing of the past, and I won't forget the lack of vocoder, either. A last, minor niggle, which is actually more greed than gripe, is the lack of digital in/out connectors. This would have made the SX700 an absolute dream for Yamaha ProMix 01, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Alesis ADAT users, and would have elevated it to the level of a truly professional piece of equipment. These, however, are comparatively minor complaints — it's hard to find fault in something that I think is one of the best new products to come on the market in the last five years.