Boss CE-300 Super Chorus
A 19-inch rack chorus from the Boss pedal empire, priced against the pedals it was built to replace.
Overview
The CE-300 is a single-space 19-inch rack chorus unit. The period dealer listings that survive put the street price at £230 in the UK. That is the same figure quoted in a London Rock Shops advertisement, next to the DSD-2 Digital Sampler pedal at £245 and the DD-2 Digital Delay pedal at £195. Boss built a rack-format chorus that cost roughly what a good pedal did, and the dealers sold it as part of the same wall of Boss effects, not as a separate studio product.
Contemporaries filed it under the Boss effects banner rather than the Roland rack line. A 1986 studio equipment inventory published in DB-Magazine (July 1986, p.18) lists a "Roland CE-300 Chorus" among the outboard in a working rig. Period paperwork wobbles between Boss and Roland on the brand, which makes sense since Boss was Roland's effects imprint, but the model is unmistakable. The same magazine's equipment lists from that era place it alongside Yamaha DX-7s and Rev-7 reverbs. It was a working studio accessory, not a collector's curiosity.
Dealer advertising is the richest surviving documentation. A Boss "Micro Rack Series" listing from the same period prices the CE-300 at £230 and groups it with the RDD-10 Delay at £149, the RSD-10 Sampler/Delay at £199, the RGE-10 graphic EQ at £115 and the RBF-10 flanger at £115. By price, the CE-300 sat at the top of that budget rack line, so Boss positioned it as the premium chorus in a family of inexpensive processors. A separate dealer ad describes it simply as the "CE-300 19-inch rack chorus unit" at £230, and another lists it in a run of Boss rack gear alongside the DE-200 digital delay.
Used listings from the period are thin. One classified advertisement in the UK music press offered a "Boss CE300 stereo chorus" at £189 secondhand. That is a modest drop from the £230 new price, which suggests the unit held its value reasonably well in the years after launch.
The surviving documentation does not establish the circuit topology, the control set, the bypass arrangement, the power requirements, the dimensions or the weight. No manufacturer specification sheet, owner's manual or service document for the CE-300 appears in the available record, and no independent bench review with measured figures has surfaced. Period advertising confirms the format, the approximate price and the market positioning. It does not confirm what is inside the box.
That gap is a bigger deal for a chorus than for most effects. Bucket-brigade or digital delay line, mono or stereo outputs, fixed or variable rate and depth - those details decide whether a rack unit is a studio tool or a set-and-forget effect. The CE-300's name and its place in the Boss rack line imply stereo operation, and period listings do call it a "stereo chorus," but the sources available here do not document how that stereo is generated.
For a buyer today, the CE-300 is known by reputation and price history but not by specification. It appears in studio inventories, it was sold at a premium within Boss's budget rack family, and it depreciated modestly on the used market. All of that points to a competent, workmanlike unit rather than a landmark one. Anyone chasing one should verify the control layout and I/O on the actual unit, because the paper trail does not supply them.
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