Hi folks,
 
After an interesting discussion with a fellow guitarist about what pedals we're using these days I have hit upon an interesting question - With several digital pedals in a chain what effects will this have on signal quality?
 
I'm quite sensitive to latency so I'd guess a small amount would creep in as the A/D D/A's do their work. In studios I've always used the logic of minimising conversion paths where-ever possible. Of course such problems are negated by in the box mixing for the most part (upsampling / dithering / rate conversion notwithstanding) but a chain of digital guitar pedals is another thing.
 
Noticed that there are a lot of digital pedals now on the market (reverbs, roto sims, modulators, pedal emulations etc) compared to when I was young. Makes a lot of sense for some styles of effect as we all know how far digital emulation has come in the last 10 years.
 
Any technical folks with some insight ? Wisdom much appreciated!

 

 
i would not worry about it.
 
 

Hehehe. I see your point truly but alas I have my scholar's hat on and remain curious to the possibilities / theory. Guess I just cant bear not to know. Knowledge for the sake of it, well aware that intuition and feeling rule all. Dont we all aspire to the artist - the odd hybrid of feel + technique ?
 
Yes I'm in a strange mood today.

It's an issue if your ears or fingers tell you it's an issue.

The only concern I have had personally over the years is noise insertion from daisy chains so I have gone the route of "all in one" digital units for 25 years now.

I went down the Voodoo Lab pedal power route a few years ago, much quieter than daisy-chaining. Although my Voodoo Lab chorus hums a bit connected to it. Mind you, that pedal hums a bit powered by any other psu I,ve tried.

I've a small board powered by a T Rex fuel tank, the little red one. Works very well.

I prefer to build up boards out of the pedals I like, and I've not as yet found a digital all-in-one I could like enough to use. I also much prefer analogue overdrive and distortion to digital "emulation" - which is one reason I don,t get on with amp emulators either, other than Samsamps.

My current annoyance is intrusive pedal footswitch "clicks". Live no-one notices them, but they can really stand out in a recording, especially when followed by a delay that keeps repeating them :-/

The main concern for digital effects is the same as for analog effects - the accumulation of analog noise. That's going to be far more significant than the cumulative distortion and quantization noise of multiple A/D-D/A conversions.
 
It would be interesting to compare two signal chains, one consisting of many digital stompboxes and the other of a single multi-effect device that only does one conversion. I don't think you'd hear much difference, but that's just my intuition. After all, the start of the chain is inherently noisy guitar pickups, and at the end of the chain you're probably going into a far-noisier amplifier. 

SilentMind
I'm quite sensitive to latency so I'd guess a small amount would creep in as the A/D D/A's do their work.

You might add as much as 2-4 ms for each pedal, but keep in mind that you will also add several ms for every 10 feet you are from the amp.