A Little Experiment (which one is the Axe?)

It seems clear that #4 is the winner here. No surprise, this is the Axe (Plexi 2). It sounds and feels incomparably better than the others, no doubt for me and for some of you.
#1 was a great surprise for me, though, it is a TC Vintage Dual Distortion, a nice distortion pedal, now discontinued. It sounds quite good IMHO, and some of you seem to agree.
#5 is an even cheaper pedal, a Boss SD-1, made in Taiwan, nothing special about it. Yes, it sounds a bit muffled, but not too bad considering its price.
#2 is a Digitech Jimi Hendrix Experience pedal, I dialed off reverb and cab emulation, nothing special about it either.
#3 is a Pod HD500, it can sound much better than this, but one of the premises of this little experiment was to use almost all default parameters, I didn't spend more than one minute making each sound. It sounds quite harsh, and it takes some more effort to get a pleasing sound from it.

All of these machines can easily sound much better. Fractal Axe and Pod HD500 have a greater margin for improvement than the little pedals, and of course, the Axe is the only one which allows the use of external IRs.

Thank you everyone for taking your time to listening and answering. I hope you have had some fun too.

No real amps were harmed in the making of this little experiment.
 
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I'm a little late to the game here but I preferred #'s 1 & 4 as well. I kept going back and forth between them but it was difficult to decide at low volumes. Thanks for doing this! I love stuff like this!!!
 
This is a great comparison, some more comparisons would be appreciated, especially with the POD HD and AXE-FX since there is so few comparisons that can be found on the Net and you can't go to the neighborhood music store and checkout an AXE-FX.
 
This wasn't really meant as a comparison, I used the same IR on every recording, and only the Axe allows the use of external IRs. Pod HD's cab emulation is really bad, much worse than its preamp and power amp emulation, IMHO. Some of Pod HD's effects are quite good, I really like some of the delays, and some of the modulation effects are quite decent too. Reverb can't be compared with the Axe's, and pitch effects are unusable for me. It is quite good for its price, very nice pedalboard, good design overall, lots of interesting features, I use it for rehearsals when I don't feel like carrying the Axe and a foot controller, and I can get a quite good sound of it, but comparing its sound quality to the Axe's is an insult.
 
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