Hardware Bypass

With modern signal processing equipment there are a couple of fundamentally different ways to affect a bypass of a particular unit. In many processors the bypass simply sets all of the processing functions so they don’t act on the signal. The signal, however, still passes through the processing circuitry, so it isn’t truly bypassed. A true bypass would occur when the input signal gets routed directly to the output, without passing through the processor or any other unnecessary circuitry. For this reason it is often referred to as a hardwire bypass, because in some devices it quite literally is a switch that routs input wires directly to output wires. The debate of the various pros and cons of either method has been going on for years and will likely continue for the foreseeable future.