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Digitech XHR Hot Rod

Posted on 3/02/2015 by mirosol

Digitech-XHR-HotRod

What is it?
Digitech XHR Hot Rod Rock Distortion from X-series. Made in china around mid 00’s.

It says Rock Distortion on the top. What to expect from its tone wasn’t anything short of obvious. But. The disappointments of shared digital board designs for the several other units of the series made me rather weary about what to expect designwise. Once the bottom plate was off, the sight was nothing close to those autowahs and reverb/delays. By the looks of the board it already looked like a digital design, but there’s no easy connection for the code burning anywhere. Just the 14 pads with nothing soldered to them.

Digitech-XHR-HotRod-guts1

So the board differs from modulation and echo effects from the series. Instead of Harman branded AudioDNA DSP chip, there is Texas Instruments processor accompanied by a oscillator crystal. Nevertheless, the design is all digital, except for the buffering and switching. Same as, well. All the digital effects.

Digitech-XHR-HotRod-guts2

For controls we have Level, Tone and Gain. But in addition to those standard controls we also have the “Morph” knob. While level/tone/gain are pretty self-explanatory, the morph isn’t. It’s sort of like scoop, depth and texture controls combined in one knob. Very effective and it discusses nicely with all the other controls. In essence, the morph adds a lot of variation to the pedal.

How does it sound?
From Marshallesque, fat OD/Dist to scooped near-metal distortion. And everything in between. Versatile and the digital code isn’t bad. The effect does not add emphasis on anything that sounds broken. Many digital distortions set the emphasis on modelling one feature of the tone the designer/programmer is after, resulting in useless one trick pony that does nothing more but walks on a pink tight rope. The biggest caveat comes from completely foreseeable behaviour. Meaning that drops in voltage or changes in guitar controls does not affect anything. At least not to the same digree we see and hear on analog designs. At worst, the tone is Ibanez MF5 resurrected as a Robocop. It’s not all bad, but it still is a Robocop. At best this shines as a squeeky clean, modern, solid distortion tone. Not clean as in “not-distorted”, but clean as is in “you won’t hear the shit storm inside the tone”. Or in other words, the overtones are just foreseeable.

Still. For the price, very decent digital rock distortion. Nothing you can’t get out of your Line 6 Pod 2.0, but still.

3 thoughts on “Digitech XHR Hot Rod”

  1. Serge says:
    23/01/2022 at 12:39

    Hi,
    great blog !

    My son’s hot rod went up in smoke due to a wrong power adapter.
    I wonder if you have a picture of the power diodes that show the exact model?

    I you ever have a service question about line6 gear, I had a service center
    for 15years, so I might be able to answer some questions.
    have a great day

    many thanks

    Serge – Belgium

    Reply
    1. mirosol says:
      23/02/2022 at 14:33

      Hi.
      If the parallel protection diode is shorted, you’ll be fine with replacing that with any schottky like 1N4001.
      +m

      Reply
  2. Alex says:
    7/12/2022 at 22:38

    Hi, thanks for all the info, your blog is a treasore trove ! I am trying to repair a Digitech Black-13, that’s the Scott Ian of Anthrax signaturen pedal. After going through your findings I believe all of the signaturen series share the same circuit design with the x-series, only the DNA Chip appears different for each pedal. My pedal is broken in two places, the top right capacitor, a 22uF50 is blown and the Diode that sits right between the 1st and second control pot is burned. Do you know what kind of diode that is ? Is that the schottky mentioned in the other post ? I would really like to give it s shot an replace those two pieces. Thanks a lot !

    Reply

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here used to be a short description of me. however, it wasn't exactly accurate anymore. so i'm replacing it with this placeholder for now. and yes. it's been a long time since my last post. but let me assure you. i'm very much still alive.

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