I tried guitar –> H9 –> amp with no other pedals. I used two different guitars. On both the bypassed signal was significantly louder than the effected signal for a wide range of settings and different presets. I tried it with the mix at 50/50 and the clean signal was much louder than the dirty signal.
My bass was a little harder to tell—levels seemed a little more comparable, and the EQ made a huge difference. I only tried one bass.
So what CrushStation presets are you using, and what are the settings? This might matter b/c your guitars could be sitting on the compression curves and gain curves differently depending on their input levels. Also have you tried adjusting the input gain of the H9?
I tried almost every preset. On guitar, NONE of them have the same volume as a bypassed signal without cranking up the output gain, or maybe you can get close by boosting the EQ across the board. But even at maximum drive, for various values of the sustain knob, engaged << bypassed if the output gain is +0 dB. The only one that’s in the ballpark from the get-go was Crawdaddy, which I think was already at +4dB, but even that seemed like it really needed to be at closer to +10 dB.
I explored the input gain, it was set to 0 dB. Increasing it didn’t seem to help, which makes sense according to my understanding of the process—if I increase the input gain, that’s just slamming the circuit, if it’s already quiet due to weird compression effects that wouldn’t help much. Again, maybe that assumption is completely wrong.
I could try to record some video/audio if that would help.
