DN-2

Boss DynaDrive DN-2 pedal. This pedal was first released in 2007 and continued to be made by Boss for about a decade, with production for the pedal ending in 2017. It's interesting; Boss sold the DN-2 for a long time given the love-it-or-hate-it opinions that the buying public seem to express regarding this pedal. Boss was clearly was able to sell a whole lot more DN-2s than, say XT-2s. And this probably has something to do with the fact that when customers are putting reviews on the websites of the main music instrument retailers, most of the reviews are positive. When it gets to people posting their opinions on independent chat boards, the consensus opinion is quite a bit different (and negative). We suspect that these two different kinds of music instrument/effects buyers run in almost completely separate circles.

Despite originally being advertised as a pedal with a digital signal processing(DSP)-pedigree, we happen to believe that the DN-2 is one of Boss's better sounding distortion pedals. The complaints of "sterile" or "plastic" sounds that we've read online, are something that when we play this pedal, we just don't hear. We wonder if the fact that it's known to be a DSP-pedal causes people who know it's a DSP-pedal to already have an opinion formed when they hear it. If somebody's already made up his or her mind, it's much easier to declare the DynaDrive "plastic".

This pedal is pretty easy to find for sale online, and because Boss was able to sell them over a long period of time, they can be had for what are today, still pretty modest prices.

The Boss DN-2 is no longer being made.

Thermionic Studios has one(1) DN-2 DynaDrive available for rental.

Controls

Image from Boss' website

• Knob 1 - "Level": Pedal volume. Turn the knob fully counter-clockwise to turn down volume.
• Knob 2 - "Tone": Fully clockwise is maximum treble frequencies in the tone. As knob is turned counter-clockwise those frequencies are filtered out.
• Knob 3 - "Drive": Sets the level of overdrive/distortion of the pedal. Turning the knob clockwise increases the amount of overdrive/distortion.
• Footswitch 1 - "On/Off": Toggles the pedal on or off.

Bypass:Buffered

Like all Boss pedals, the DN-2 has a buffered bypass.

General Information

This pedal's greatest claim to fame is a feature that a lot of other pedals claim for themselves - to be able to distort hard when someone plays their instrument hard, and to clean up when their instrument is played softly. You can go to YouTube and see many pedal reviews with people turning down the volume on their guitar or other instrument and play a bit, and then say "See how it cleans up when I turn the volume down or play softer?"

The DN-2, in our opinion, just does it better. There's likely some kind of envelope detector built into the pedal, this envelope detector doesn't just "flip on" or off at some point, but tracks the audio envelope across it's softness and loudness and ramping the distortion accordingly. As this pedal functions, as notes or chords get played louder and louder, and as the dynamic envelope is pushed harder and harder, so the overdrive being played from the DN-2 gets thicker and thicker. In fact, you can have your guitar volume up all the way, and the drive up all the way on the DN-2 and when you're playing hard enough, it doesn't sound like Overdrive anymore. It sounds like Distortion. And that's not something that we have heard in almost any other similar type of pedal.

Pedal Manual

• Boss DN-2 Dyna Drive Owner's Manual

Phase Inversion:Unknown

As there is no schematic, we'll need to put this on an oscilloscope to see if this pedal inverts phase. Knowing Boss, our first inclination is to cautiously assume that this pedal does not invert phase.

Schematic

There is no schematic for this pedal as it uses DSP (digital signal processing) to create its sounds. We are unaware of any schematic for this pedal.

Artists

We are currently unaware of any artists actively using the pedal now, or who have in the past.

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Additional Sources