SONICAKE IR Pedal Speaker Cabinet Simulator Impulse Response Loader Guitar Bass Effects Pedal

$30 for a functional A/B pedal is great. This one does almost everything right and is a great value. It even does A/B switching in a mini-sized enclosure, which is impressive. My unit doesn't have any noticeable popping, and so far as I can tell doesn't degrade the signal. I was also happy to see that despite the description saying that A+B mode only works with Y as the input, mine did it just fine with Y as the output. In my case there was no change in volume when joining the signals, either (which can be a problem sometimes with stuff like this), which is awesome.So what could be better? I was a little surprised to see that the A+B mode basically disengaged the pedal button completely. Normally what you see in a 2-button footswitch is an A/B button and an A or B button. One of them normally switches between A and B. the other (A or B) will add or subtract the remaining channel. I had expected that Sonicake's unit would do something similar with the mode switch changed. Instead, it just ignores the pedal switch and everything is on all the time. I get why they did that, since with only one button available you couldn't get the full functionality easily. But I would have liked it better if I could get some form of A / A+B accessible via the footswitch in the second mode.The small size is both a strength and a minor drawback - with an enclosure this small there's no room for a battery. This isn't a huge deal since the pedal works without the battery (it only powers the LED), and many pedals of this kind don't have an LED anyway. Still, if I could choose between this and a version of the same thing in a bigger enclosure to hold a battery, I might have chosen the larger one. That's more feedback than criticism, but it's something to consider. I usually prefer batteries in pedals which only need them for the LED in order to avoid ground loop issues and save space on my board.Speaking of which, when I first plugged this pedal in, there was a significant ground hum introduced into my signal chain. I was a little puzzled by this since the power shouldn't even be connected to the sound. This probably means I was producing a ground loop that was showing up elsewhere. I ended up swapping out what was connecting to what (and what was daisy-chained) for other reasons before troubleshooting this and the issue happened to go away, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. It probably wasn't this pedal's fault anyway, but it is something to watch out for (again, this is why I might have preferred a battery for this).5 stars for price and accomplishing what it set out to do. It might be a little unfair but if I could I'd take half a star for not handling the A+B issue differently. I guess their answer to the design issue at hand was valid but I think that part could be improved upon. But if you look at that as just a bonus feature anyway and look at this as an A/B pedal, this is a great unit and an outstanding value.

This little pedal punches way above its size and price. Its built like a tank. The most important thing to know is that this is a high gain fuzz pedal, there are neither incense nor pepperments here, it sounds like a muff clone, but seems like with even more gain. If you dial it all the way back you can get some slighly more mellow tones but this thing sounds great playing crushing doom riffs tuned down to C. Which is not what I was expecting, but I've spent hundreds on Black Arts Toneworks pedals that didnt do it as well as this thing. it doesnt have pictures of a dark forest or an evil wizard on it so I guess thats where the extra money goes. I dunno what to say, there it is. Doom on?

So far it seems to be a great product, but with a few caveats. I bought 3 - 1 worked great, 1 had trouble, and 1 isn't working. But had I known a few things, I likely could have prevented this scenario... Hope these tips help!1.) I couldn't seem to transfer the new IR's to the device on my Mac running Sonoma OS. But I was able to do it on a Windows machine... but the next point may be why.2.) When I attached to a Windows PC, I quickly found the normal 44.1K 500ms IR .wav files were too large. I could only get three of those on the device. For some reason on my mac, I could only get 1, and after that a perpetual error code that the file couldn't be transferred (but not due to storage... weird).Windows at least showed there wasn't enough space on the drive. So, after searching Sonicake IR Loader and going to their website, I found where I could download the manual, then under that I could download the original IR's, then under that is a link called IR File Converter, and it says it requires Google Chrome to use.You can only convert one file at a time, but it worked flawlessly. Then I was able to load the files on to the device. So, maybe it would have worked on my mac if I had converted the files to a smaller file type? I went through enough frustration to give it a shot. It's working now, so I'm not going to mess with it anymore. :)3.) I bought 3 of these to use at our church. On the attempt to get it working on my mac, I reformatted. It's originally in a FAT12 file format. The reformat didn't seem to help. However, on another unit, the reformat locked up as the built-in storage is crazy slow. It corrupted the built-in storage, so I'll send that one back for an exchange.4.) Lastly, while the stock IR's are actually pretty sweet out of the box, I wanted to load some IR's that I've been using on my Line 6 HX Stomp XL. I dedicated one of these units to bass guitar, and two toward acoustic guitars. My favorite acoustic clone IR's have come from Worship Tutorials - the Taylor 414, and Holy Grail 2 guitars in particular. The bass guitar IR's came from Celestion and are bass cab/speaker profiles BN15-300x and Studio Nord Bremen Ampeg V4b Custom and Ampeg V4b Trace Elliot, and the Orange custom as well. I mention these since the bass and acoustic IR's are a bit harder to locate.But one caveat for acoustic IR's... acoustic IR's by default all come about -18db. I'm not sure why, but they do. So, the only way to use the acoustic IR's on this unit is to crank the volume all the way, and crank the gain on your PA around 20db +/-. But, it's totally worth it if you're plugging in direct to PA. And it bypasses the need for a DI box.I don't have any noise issues when I crank the volume and gain on these. Build quality is great. And the price can't be beat. Even though I had a lot of headache getting these setup, the end result and price point make it worth 4 stars. Now that I know how to work with them, I'd buy it again in a heartbeat. But definitely follow some of these guidelines. The built-in memory is very small, very slow, very temperamental, and easily corrupted. But once it works, it's great!Hope the tips help. It's a super affordable way to have great tone!