Fanyo,
Thanks for the detailed info. I don’t feel defensive about my design work or the Quaverato. I’m constantly learning and I would probably even design the Quaverato somewhat differently if I was to do it over again these days (after all I’ve learned in the years since I designed it). I’m always wanting to learn and be a better engineer, so thanks for letting me be a part of this troubleshooting process.
One thing that I’m curious about is to remove the looper from the equation…have you tried using the Quaverato and other pedals together outside of the looper? According to the user manual the PXL live does have “buffered bypass.”
I know you said you tried every conceivable combination of pedal orders and it happened on all of them…but If the Quaverato is the very last pedal in the chain (hooked up to the looper) before the amp, does it still cause this issue? What about if it is the last pedal in the chain after the looper, where the looper output is plugged in to the Quaverato input and the Quaverato output is going into the amp, does the volume jump happen then, when other pedals are turned on?
Have you tested the Quaverato when it is just plugged into the amp and your guitar? I’m curious if the boost you hear is really the normal volume level of the Quaverato, and the volume level is being reduced when it is in the pedal chain.
So far, from the list of facts you gave, none of them disprove my original hypothesis of it being a frequency sensitivity issue. I don’t know how you can say this is definitely not true. This type of thing can be experienced with an overdrive or distortion pedal that has the tone know all the way up…there is often a large boost associated with that adjustment, most of the time at least 20% boost. Most of the time, when modulation effects have this issue it is at a much lower volume level than what you are experiencing here, but it doesn’t always have to be. The same principles could be at work here. Unfortunately, it will take more than a multimeter to test it…you would need at least an oscilloscope and signal generator. You could experiment with the crossover switches, changing the frequency to see if that has an impact on the boosted/jumped signal. If it does, that’s a clue pointing to what is happening.
Let me know what you find when you have the opportunity to check these things out.
Good luck!
-Brach