Soooo. With the added benefit of hindsight and the reveal, I'm now listening to these clips on something other than MacBook Air speakers. Now weirdly, I am certain I could hear more marked differences on laptop speakers that I cannot in a well treated room with Adam A5X monitors. Comments below based on the best critical listening environment I have (and probably that I have ever used. Even the losers get lucky sometimes, as a wise man once sang.
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Tube Screamer: an old favourite, (mine are all TS-10s, and I think I have 3 or 4 with various modifications, one of them is pretty much a TS-808 circuit, FET switches aside), love the clarity and cut-through even though the fuzz doesn't really clean up as chords decay. In fairness I think all 4 brands have made a pretty good job of this. Love the real pedal. Struggling to pick between Fractal and Brand N as favourite for closest, but Brand L is for me 3rd place. I am not entirely sure why, because to my ears they are all pretty much on the money with this one, but there's just something not quite as "Tube Screamy" about it.
SD-1: Got one of these, don't often use it, but now wondering why. Has a real "chewy" comb filtering thing going on in low mids. Again it would be really hard to say any of the models sound bad, but Fractal and Brand N are both really close to my ears. I like the Brand L sound, but it seems to be removing slightly different frequencies to the other brands, giving a slightly different feel. Less muddy to my ears, but ultimately less faithful to what it is trying to replicate.
DS-1: Think I have 2 of these little monsters somewhere. Not subtle.
This is the first set of clips where there is something clearly not quite right in the clips for me. Fractal and Brand N have tone and texture very similar to the pedal, but Brand L has something a little weird going on with the ADSR envelope, and it seems particularly obvious (to me at least) in the single note parts of the riff. Almost as if there's a failing PP3 battery being simulated.
Timmy: This is the one where the differences really start to show. The Fractal is just about bang on the same as the pedal in every way that I can hear. Brand L is, to me at least, way off the mark tonally. Clearer, but really lacking in body and general warm "thickness". Never had one of these pedals, but I can see why people might rave about them. I think if you put one of these in a parallel signal path with a clean FET boost you would have a pretty effective "workalike" of a Klon Centaur.
I repeated the exercise complete, using a pair of ATH M50x headphones. Absolutely the same result in every way.
Digested read: Fractal Drive models sound great, and are incredibly faithful representations of the pedals they model. Brand N also do a pretty amazing job of this to my ears. While I've been pretty firmly set on a Fractal path myself for some time, I would certainly not dismiss the products on the basis of quality and authenticity of Drive models. Brand L don't
seem to be quite as good for authenticity of Drive models. That doesn't mean their Drive models don't sound good, just that they are not quite in the same league for matching the tone and feel of the pedals they aim to impersonate.
Liam
