Best Rangemaster clone out there.

After playing with my BBE Bohemian treble booster for years I came across an old Dallas Rangemaster unit in our local studio. For so long I assumed that my BBE Bohemian sounds similar to the Rangemaster but when I heard the real Rangemaster I stood corrected. I realized that compared to the real Rangemaster my BBE Bohemian had a harsher breakup. There was a certain hairy but smooth feel to the tone produced by the Rangemaster which was missing with my Bohemian.

However, the biggest difference was in how they responded to me dialing back my guitar's volume or playing notes softly. The original Rangemaster was a lot more responsive to my playing dynamics. I could get different kinds of tone out of it just by changing the volume of my guitar, and also cleaned up a lot better than the Bohemian when I rolled back the volume of my guitar.

Compared to it my Bohemian behaved more like an op-amp based overdrive pedal. It didn't respond to my playing dynamics like the Rangemaster, it just felt stiff. Changing the volume of the guitar produced no major change in tonality, and it din't clean up like the Rangmaster either when I rolled back the volume of my guitar. So, from what I concluded from my comparisons is that despite of being voiced like the Rangemaster the op-amp based Bohemian just didn't sound and behave like a genuine Rangemaster. It got close in terms of tonality at times but it never behaved like a genuine Rangemaster.

That's why I looked around for a genuine germanium transistor based treble booster, and came across this pedal. I ordered mine with NOS CV7003 transistors which are military issued variants of OC44 transistors. At $180 it wasn't cheap but it wasn't insanely priced like some other Rangemaster clones. This time instead of just believing on my instincts I went back to the studio with this pedal and compared it side by side to the original Dallas Rangmaster. Not only the tonality of this pedal was absolutely spot on, but also it responded perfectly like the genuine Rangemaster. The only difference I noticed was in the noise floor. This pedal has lower noise than the original Rangemaster, maybe the quality of the military issued OC44 transistors has something to do with it.