« It's an ok phaser »

This is another in the line of standard boss stomp boxes. It has stamdard 1/4" input and output jacks, rear 9 volt DC jack, battery compartment under bypass, along with top controls for rate (speed), depth, resonance, and mode (1 or 2).
Like the rest it's all contained in a small box built like a brick.

UTILIZATION

Set-up is simple like the rest of the boss single pedal line. It hooks up like any other pedal with two cables and some power whether it's a battery or standard "boss style" adapter. The controls are pretty self explanatory but the manual is well written and explains the difference between the two modes and what the depth and resonance controls do. Like most pedals I prefer the hands on approach to figuring these things out.

SOUND QUALITY

I used this pedal in a large pedal board set up as one of two modulation pedals. I found the bypass to be fine as long as there weren't lots of other buffered bypass pedals in line with it. I did not notice a big loss in tone that could not be remedied by adjusting the amp's tone controls. In some cases the buffer actually helped my sound as I was running a tossed together board at the time and needed something to help drive my signal through the mess.

The phaser effect was alright. It's good enough for most uses but is not anything special and has a pretty consistent sound no matter where the dials are. Obviously there is a difference with all controls on ten as opposed to zero but I could always tell it was the boss phaser even when hearing others use it. Listen to an old incubus record and you will hear this pedal a lot.

I preferred mode 1 as it was a bit more subtle and could be used more often without sounding too over the top. With the speed set slow and depth midway it was a nice way to add movement to clean parts. I never liked how it sounded with distortion. In front of distortion it sounds cheap and after distortion it has way to much of an effect on the sound.

OVERALL OPINION

If you just need a simple phaser for a few parts this will probably work for you. It's a boss so it's pretty much impossible to break and it's easily replaceable. The older ph1 is a much better sound if you can find one and beyond that there are tons of other phasers with more options and better sounds.