bought to review

I purchased this pedal because it was relatively cheap for a brand new tube tremolo, and also because I could not find any useful reviews about it. I was looking for a pedal to serve as an extension to a practice amp. Reverb could be better, but tremolo looked like a natural choice, and I thought a tube tremolo with a master volume option might also serve as a preamp powered by tube gain. Wrong. Let me start with the bad news: despite of the tube drive, you cannot use this pedal as a plain pream, because the tremolo effect is present at even minimum level of all controls. Secondly, the "master volume" option should rather be called an "attenuator" option, since it only starts boosting the signal when set past 3 'o clock, leaving the majority of its range for volume UNDER the bypass volume. This is weird. Does anyone want to reduce volume with a tremolo activated? As for tremolo unit: my ears are not trained enough to judge if it's a opto or a real tube bias tremolo, but I suspect the latter. One thing for sure: the effect differs from any settings of any tremolos I've heard before. It has a very prominent, choppy, staggered sound at all settings of the wave control, even at minimum setting, smoothing it a bit indeed, while it provides the staccato of a machine gun when maxed. Quite the same with the rest of the controls: The "Speed" range extends from carpet dusting to machine gun speed, and "Depth" sets the effect from prominent to very prominent. No subtle pulsating wobble is possible, the effect is straight in your face at even minimal setting. When recorded and mixed with other instruments it curiously sounds cool, no blending, it is just there, natural, asymmetrical, and if a tremolo can sound "warm" it is warm then, the tube does the job. The thing that I'm missing here is an "effect level" knob to mix the rate of dry and tremolo signal, but since I've never had the opportunity to drive a real onboard trem of a Vox or a blackface Fender, maybe it's the good old, familiar and simple stompbox trem sound is what I'm looking for.