The market is getting flooded… TODAY?
(And now, for something completely different… @crappyboards defending cheap pedals)
Sure, there’s a lot of crap coming out of China (counterfeit Gibsons, anyone?), but you have to admit that, when it comes to pedals, what we have now is a HUGE step up from the import crap we had in the 80s and 90s. Some of the pedals above aren’t shitty per se, but at least when it comes to construction and reliability the chinese are doing much better.
They’re pretty much took cues from 2000s boutique makers: mechanical switch, true bypass, Hammond/MXR enclosure, focus on classics, and learned how to do it cheaper. When they copy something today, they only copy from the best: classics from Boss, MXR, EHX and Ibanez, Rats, stuff like that.
Also, some of those “crap” brands is even supplying long-forgotten parts to established makers: XVive is selling MN3005 chips to Electro Harmonix and Chase Bliss today.
On top of that, they’re actually doing originals now: pretty much every digital pedal is using chinese DSP is an original, not a clone of a famous pedal. A poster on this thread implied that those are TC Electronics clones. They’re not.
I mean, why bother? With DSP, it’s all in the software. Reverse engineering firmware is a pain in the butt, since it is chip-specific. Just copying the firmware would be a copyright violation, which would make it hard to sell overseas. Lots of brands (such as BOSS, Digitech and Zoom) are designing their own DSP processors which aren’t exactly stock parts. Not to mention that cloning something like a Strymon is cost prohibitive, because they’re using those super-expensive SHARC processors (so, no, the Mooer Shimverb is by no means a Strymon Bluesky clone, as if the size didn’t give it up).
The chinese already have access to DSP chips from makers who provide code samples that already sound good enough, so that’s what they use. It might not sound as good as a DD-500, Strymon or Chase Bliss, but it will probably perform and sound as good as digital stuff from the 90s and 2000s.
Their DSP is probably as interesting as what’s in the super-boutiquey Dr. Scientist Bitquest (an ILoveFuzz darling) or Mr. Black pedals, which are pretty much stock circuits built around a FV-1 DSP with customization on the software. The chinese don’t go too far as those builders in weirdness, but it’s basically the same ingredients.
Sure, there’s crap such as fake Mad Professors, Xotics and Fulltones, which are super-lame (you’ll deserve a post here if you use them), but I must admit that, while there’s a lot of sameness in the chinese pedal industry these days, they’re doing much better than their japanese counterparts from the 70s and 80s.
I do post a lot of all-Joyo and all-Mooer boards here, but that’s because they feel like pointless collections rather than pedalboards, but it’s not a shame to have a Joyo or Mooer if you’re having fun.
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