Analog Man Buffer

The Analog Man Buffer is a buffer pedal from Analog Man, hand made in the USA, designed to keep your guitar signal strong and its frequencies intact over long cable and pedalboard runs¹. Analog Man's stated goal for it is a "virtual cable": the maker describes the sound as warm with a touch of compression and a natural frequency response, but without changing your tone¹.

A buffer, as BOSS's Jim Bybee explains, is short for "buffer amplifier": it lowers the output impedance, strengthening the weak high-impedance guitar signal so it can travel over longer cable lengths without tone degradation². In a Sweetwater demo, Joki Schaller put it more simply: a buffer is a small amplifier at unity gain that changes the impedance from high to low and preserves the signal information for the rest of the chain³. Without one, long unbuffered cable runs and complex chains of stompboxes and patch cables can dull the treble and weaken the response⁴⁵.

A virtual cable: what the buffer does to your signal

Analog Man's design goal is that the buffer should behave like a cable that costs you nothing. The maker describes it as "warm with a touch of compression and natural frequency response but without changing your tone"¹. In other words, it is not meant to add character the way an overdrive or fuzz pedal does; it is meant to preserve what your guitar and amp already sound like once your rig grows past a few pedals and a long cable.

The circuit is where the warmth comes from. Analog Man uses the same input transistor as an old Tube Screamer, giving the buffer the same 510K input impedance as that pedal, and the Tube Screamer's JRC4558D opamp later in the circuit for what the maker calls a warm but clean unity gain amplifier¹. The topology is a transistor on the input and an op-amp on the output, which Analog Man describes as "the best of both worlds - nice silky tone and" a strong output¹.

That 510K input impedance is worth comparing before you buy, because it is lower than most dedicated buffers on the market¹:

A lower input impedance loads the pickups slightly more, which is part of why the Analog Man unit leans warm rather than perfectly transparent. Whether that matters depends on your pickups and what sits in front of it. See the Suhr Buffer and Empress Effects Buffer pages for the higher-impedance alternatives¹⁶⁷.

Built into a volume pedal

One of the Analog Man Buffer's distinguishing features is that it does not have to be a pedal on your board at all. Analog Man can build the buffer into volume pedals and their own switchboxes¹:

• Boss FV500-L: normally installed on one side (Input 1/Output 1), the side with the TUNER OUT jack. A second buffer can be added to the other side for stereo buffered signals¹.
• Ernie Ball VP Junior 25K 6181: built in with an added power jack, which Analog Man describes as killing two birds with one stone and saving pedalboard space¹.
• Analog Man switchboxes: the buffer can be built into any of them, for example a TUNER MUTE SWITCH that also handles your tuner and its cable¹.

Power supply notes: 9V to 18V

The buffer runs fine at 9V off a battery or a normal power supply. If you have a really loud signal, Analog Man says you can run it at higher voltages such as 18V for more headroom¹.

That 9 to 18V range is common among current buffers, including the Red Panda Bit Buffer (9 to 18 VDC, center negative)⁹, the Shnobel Tone Buffer (9 to 18V)¹⁰, the Mythos Buffer (9 to 18 volts)¹¹, the Revival Engineering Glory Buffer (9 to 18V, which the maker pitches as additional clean headroom)⁹¹⁰¹¹, and the AmpMojo Trans Am A/B Buffer (9, 12, or 18 volts for varying degrees of headroom)⁹¹⁰¹¹. Running at the higher end of the range gives the opamp more room before clipping, which matters most with hot signals or active pickups.

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