DS-1 BK – a Guitar Center exclusive with orange font on a black body, released in 2016 and limited to 3,000 units.

[8] DS-1 White – Guitar Center/Musician's Friend/Music & Arts exclusive metallic white with black font, released in 2024 [9] The blueprint of the DS-1 circuit is simple, with a pair of in- and output buffers surrounding a transistor boost stage, an operational amplifier gain stage with hard clipping diodes, and a tone control.

This serves to remove unnecessary bass frequencies before the distortion stage, preventing the signal from accumulating muddiness as it is amplified.

The operational amplifier gain stage is the most important part of the Boss DS-1 circuit, featuring the clipping diodes, Op-amps and further filters which refine and color the sound.

In 1994, the Toshiba pre-amps were nearing the end of their stock life, and so the circuit had to be modified in order to play host to an easier to find dual op amp, the Rohm BA728N.

[11] The seasaw nature of the tone control leads to a -12 dB volume loss which gives the pedal an output of 350mV[12] , which is suitable for most applications but does create issues with the DS-1 being able to achieve unity gain with higher level inputs.