If I want to mangle something, or occasionally on a weird pad. Honestly don’t find most of them super useful ordinarily though. Otherwise I primarily use mine as a saturation box - the wobbly stuff grew tiring quicker than anticipated. The Saturation is gnarly on drums.
I am, mostly because I’m lazy and don’t know if I’m keeping mine.
Yeah im keeping mine OG, unless it starts to bother me. It’s good to know i can change it if i desire I guess but for now its fine
They’re probably going to be worth a lot in the future when people want that “early model with the true lo-fi sound”.
Yeah you know its gonna happen, although i guess nerds/modders could put it back in.
I’m just happy everyone who ever wanted a gen loss can get one now.
Great service, went to cba eu office and got to loan a batch 2 model to test/compare eith my batch 1.
Any requests?
I’ll throw in a tonal recall red knob mod pedal if anyone wants to complain. It’s got a LPF tone knob.
Interesting.
First observations:
the sound through both pedals is different, already when the pedal is bypassed. more bass in batch 2. This gives a fuller bassy sound (also when turned on), but also seems more muddy and distorting faster when cranking saturation up on an entire mix/song…
difficult to choose! will test more.
Full thesis ending with objective conclusion of which one is better, please (sarcasm . . . mostly) 
The right one looks more vintage. Which one is the modded one? 
I thought I would drop this one in, recorded today.
On listening back, it was immediately obvious that I had ‘Failure’ dialled in in a less than subtle fashion 
, in particular the ‘drop’ (detached tapehead) aspect.
Still, you live and you learn… (and I soon learnt that ‘drop’ can be dropped via the dip switches, if need be, which will be interesting to play with).
Lyra 8 through the Tensor / Mood / Gen Loss II / Cosmos (and Big Sky for a bit of widescreen).
I’ve noticed that when using the pedal stereo-in-stereo-out, the Wow and Flutter seem to be affecting each channel differently, causing a slight phase shift between the two channels as the pitch/speed fluctuations happen. Did they do it this way because this is how wow and flutter occur in real tape playback? One would expect that wow and flutter would affect both stereo channels to the same degree simultaneously but I don’t know enough about the mechanics of tape machines to know whether that’s an accurate assumption.
Edit: Wow so Ricky Tinez noticed the exact same thing I did. Even on full dry with zero wet signal, you get weird phasing things happening. I thought I was going nuts.
Damn, I kinda hope they modify this aspect of the signal path in an update, or allow you to customize it. Same with the amplitude fluctuations from Wow/Flutter.
Does this happen even with SPREAD switched off?
There’s a switch to have the pedal affect the two channels the same way.
Tinez’ remark has been discussed quite a lot above, and CBA provided an alternative firmware to address this quickly enough, which has also been discussed.
Yes, I hadn’t engaged Spread when discovering this and engaged-disengaged the dip switch to be sure.
The default state is for the pedal to affect the two channels in the same way. The Spread switch causes the pedal to affect the two channels differently for creative stereo effects, and I’ve left this setting off.
My mistake, thank you. My unit is from batch 2 and its bass response is excellent so it may already have the latency firmware and the hardware mod installed. I’ll install the firmware again to be sure. What I’m hearing may be the “flange-y” character of the sound that the documentation of the update warns about.
Theoretically this shouldn’t be a latency issue since I’m using the pedal in 100% wet, so I’m still a bit confused about this. But maybe there’s something about how the signal process works that I don’t understand/am not aware of.
Even at 100% wet there will always be chorus and flange effects if it’s set to stereo processing, since each channel is undergoing independent speed changes there will always be periods where the time difference between the two is less than 20 milliseconds and sliding.
Lowering the flutter pot may produce less flange effect, since that’s the faster modulator. Also the saturation “hysteresis” effect lends itself nicely to emphasising chorus and flange effect, as over evidenced by guitarists placing distortion or fuzz in front of a flange or chorus pedal.
TBH. I prefer not to use its spread/stereo function and have had it permanently attached to the Ventris stereo reverb pedal.
Thank you for the explanation! That makes sense.
I feel it should be possible to process in stereo at 100% wet without chorusing/flanging, just as you would with a plugin like Softube Tape or Arturia Tape Mello-Fi. I’m surprised they didn’t account for people who might want to use this on a master bus, since tape by its very nature is an end-of-chain medium, and stereo hardware tape simulators are few and far between (and very expensive).
In fact even if you’re not using this on a master bus and are tracking individual instruments or layers of a song with it, it seems reasonable to expect that you can use it in stereo at 100% wet without introducing unwanted chorusing/flanging. Bit of a bummer.
It’s a guitar pedal, an excellent guitar pedal, made for guitars.
Breaking rules is what we do. So we have to take responsibility for the artefacts.
Especially on a lofi pedal 
… and if we wish to see CBA make other stereo pedals!
