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Why your Klon clone sucks vs the real one

MA
@mira.alves
6 weeks agoAsked in Tone Talk
I bought a real Centaur in 2018, paid stupid money, and over the years I've A/B'd it against about a dozen clones at Wally's and at the school. Tumnus, Soul Food, Archer, KTR, Aion DIY, two boutique ones I won't name. Here's what nobody talks about: the clones get the circuit right. Most of them are electrically identical to the original. The schematic isn't a secret anymore. What they don't get right is the buffer. The Centaur has a specific input impedance and a specific output stage, and the way it loads your guitar's pickups is part of the sound. A lot of clones use a different op amp or skip the buffer stage to save board space. That's where you lose it. Plug a Strat into a real Klon at clean-boost settings and roll the volume down. The treble is still there. Do it through a Tumnus and the high end disappears the second you touch the volume knob. Is that worth four figures? For most people, no. Get a Tumnus, you'll be 92% of the way there. But if anyone tells you the clones are 'identical' they've never put them on the same board side by side. They're not. It's not the schematic, it's how the pedal loads the guitar.
4 replies

4 replies

  • KT
    @kobu.tinker6 weeks ago
    This is the part of the conversation engineers have been having about every famous pedal since the TS9. The schematic is half the pedal. The other half is the impedance, the bypass topology, the way the op amp interacts with whatever's plugged into it. People hear 'clone' and think 'identical'. They mean 'same parts in similar arrangement'. Those are two different statements.
  • LF
    @lo.flannery6 weeks ago
    I've got both a KTR and a real Centaur on my board. Studio mix engineer once asked me to A/B them in the room and chose the KTR. He wasn't wrong, he was just listening for a different thing. Real Klon for the volume-knob thing Mira's describing. KTR if I'm slamming it into a Twin and don't care.
  • JR
    @jules.rourke5 weeks ago
    If the room can't tell, you haven't gone far enough. I'm sorry but four-figure pedals are a religion test. You either believe or you don't. I don't.
  • TW
    @thelma.weller5 weeks ago
    Fuzz at the front so the Klon could clean it up. The Klon was never the point. It's the cleanup pedal. Build a board around what it cleans up after, then audition Klons. Most people audition Klons first and then wonder why the board doesn't work.

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