Green is the Colour: Ibanez Tube Screamer TS808 vs. Joyo Vintage Overdrive
Posted on 02/02/2012 by ozzy in The Blog
This post may be off topic, regarding the focus of this website, however I just want to share my experience with one of those cheap chinese pedal clones available everywhere. Recently I purchased a Vintage Overdrive pedal by Joyo (mine was labeled Razzor) which should be based on the Ibanez Tube Screamer TS808. On the forums you can find mostly positive reviews about it so I wanted to try the pedal myself. From what I've learnt from playing it about a day or so, I must say, this pedal rocks. It realy can - from at least 80 % - sound exactly like TS808. And I do not take this 80 % as a negative. Most of the time I managed to create the tone that had a very little difference between TS808 and Vintage Overdrive, or no difference at all. This pedal cost me mere 30 EUR (40 USD), while my TS808 was the 200 EUR (265 USD) at Thomann.de. So was Tube Screamer worth the money? Unfortunately, not for me. And from my point of view, the pricing of most of the boutique padal clones on the market looks even more ridiculous to me now. Don't get me wrong, I still consider the TS808 to be a better pedal with a slightly wider range of sounds than Joyo. But question is if you really, really, really need them and are willing to pay more.
The Joyo pedals are solid and very well built (even the surface mount soldering is reasonably good). I also purchased the Joyo Ultimate Drive (Razzor Hellrider) which claims to be the Fulltone's OCD clone. As I do not own the OCD I cannot do the A/B test so if you have a personal experience with this pedal, or with any other interesting chinese pedal clones, like Moen, Beta Aivin, KLD, etc., please feel free to share your thoughts in the discussion below.
