Boss TU-80C Chromatic Tuner & Metronome

 (24 customer reviews)

I like the accuracy of the tuner, and it "hears" my acoustic guitar quite well if I put it on the music stand so that it's angled toward me. As a metronome, however, it leaves much to be desired: (1) the volume is not adjustable and I consider it not loud enough, (2) it makes a cheesy electronic chirp instead of a mechanical-sounding knock as some of the electronic metronomes can, and (3) the rhythm is "dotted," i.e., it puts a milder electronic chirp in between the "main chirps" and there's no way to turn it off (but this can be somewhat remedied by setting it to 1-4 time).

The tuning capability is only mediocre; the "Accu-Pitch" function might better be sold as "Approxi-Pitch." When I check my 2 TU-80 tuners against a high-end one, I find that the Accu-Pitch beep can sound as much as 5 cents out of tune, which is bad enough so that I have to retune.

As far as the metronome goes, as other reviewers have noted, it's just not loud enough to be anything but a toy. Too bad, too - there was an opportunity to send the metronome signal out of the output jack, so that it could have driven an earphone, or could have been fed into a mixer, which was a choice that Boss itself made in its much-superior DB-12 metronome, but absent that feature, this metronome can't be used as an aid for practicing any real-world instrument.

Reading through the reviews for the TU-80, it seems there's a lot of grumbling that misses the point of what a tuner should do. Above all, it should be accurate and clear in the readings it gives. Too often tuners fail to do this. The reading wanders back and forth, never quite settling on whether the note is flat, sharp, or dead on. For a tuner, this is entirely unacceptable. A tuner's job is to tell us whether or not the note is in tune. If the tuner can't make up its mind, then what's the point of having it?

While I can't say I've tried every tuner on the market, I've tried many. Most recently I auditioned the Guitar Research JC 200, Sabine MT 9000, Korg TM-40, Fishman FT-1, Korg MA-30, and the Korg GT-3. With the exception of the Sabine, all of them more or less display the problem I described above. (The Sabine MT 9000 has a different problem: it takes too long to give a reading after you play a string.) For my taste, the Boss TU-80 was superior to all the tuners...Read more