NPD: Lovepedal Kanji Eternity

[BlixaFan]

Hey OSG!

who still has one of these on their board? I spotted one on my local marketplace, and after a bit of quick research, i couldn't pass up on it for the price it was going for. everything I seem to find about this pedal is about 15 years old, so i don't know if they are no longer making these, or if they are no longer "the thing" to have, but it sounds like a great drive.

if I find it doesn't quite work for me, then i'll sell it, but i'm excited to compare it to my OCD, my blues driver, and my TC Integrated preamp clone, as a drive in front of both my SV20H and my EVH 5150iiii.

tell me what you know about these pedals, and what your favorite settings are, or what pedals this replaced on your board etc.

[hulakatt]

IIRC, they're kind of a nice lightly modded ts808 circuit. Various finishes denoted various circuit tweaks and if they were handwired or wave soldered or built by robots or some other such bullshit at different price points. I always lowkey wanted one and started wading through a lot of the bs and hype to figure out which one to look for when the hype dropped off but forgot about it. I still look from time to time but never got one.

I've also had interest in Lovepedal's HPTT pedal but never picked one up. They sound quit good to me.

I owned one of their Champ dirty boosts and it was cool and built decent but clearly mass produced (like modern MXR level quality) and nothing special or boutique like the company used to be. I think the Eternity period was what kind of brought them out of their boutique pedal roots to mass producing stuff and I don't know how the Kanji ones were built.

[BlixaFan]

interesting! thanks for sharing. i think you're right...
looks like mine is the PCB version. i also decided it's not really a sound i need, and i depend on my amps for drive these days anyway, so it's up for sale.

[hulakatt]

That was fast. How is it as a tubescreamer at least?

[BlixaFan]

I don’t have a ton of experience with the Tube Screamer…but my limited experience tells me that the screamer has a little more oomph

[hulakatt]

I've played a fair number of "better" tubescreamers but the Maxon OD-9 really can't be beat. Considering Maxon built them for Ibanez right up until the 00's, they know what's what and the OD-9 is Maxon's "what if this thing was built by engineers instead of accountants?" version of the TS-9 where the Ibanez version is the reverse of that. It looks the same and uses a more robust version of the same board but uses true bypass and higher quality components throughout. The only way it gets better is sending it to Analogman for 808 mods which just make it more subtle.