If you know what your getting into and are familiar with preamps like this then this is a excellent pedal. The preloaded cabs and IR's are top notch. Using mine with a headrush MX5, Ibanez 442R guitar, and a Fender Blues jr. Tube amp. Super high quality sounds with rich, saturated distortion and breakup. Doubles as an eq which is nice. And the PC program that works with it easily updates the pedal and best of all, allows for user downloaded custom IR's of which there are at least hundreds and with my tube amp at least, can really growl and purr. Deff loud as heck and I wish when I changed between sounds it stayed at the volume I had set. I have to turn a nob to get it to go down in volume after clicking which is annoying but tone wise, wow wasn't expecting it to beef up the Headrush so much so easily. Great for the right player or setup though!
S
Scrimshaw
★★★★★
A nice, but rather expensive, multi-preset preamp.
This Mooer Preamp x2 is pretty nice. It’s got a lot of capability, which basically boils down to being able to easily between 14 different preamp settings. You have two stomp switches to control the 7 preamp slots, plus a save button.
Each slot holds 2 channels, channel A and B, so there are 7x2=14 presets. Channel A tends to be the lower gain presets, and channel B the higher gain. As many other reviewers have mentioned, in each of these 14 presets you can change the preamp settings (and save them), but each bank (of 7) uses the same cab sim. If you want to change the cab sim for either channel, you need to use the software. So, you can have only 2 cab sims at a time (one for the 7 Channel A presets, and one for the 7 channel B presets), and you can either turn the cab on or off (by pressing channel B and save simultaneously).
It’s not clearly explained in this description, but the slots for channel A are all blue, while the channel B slots are all violet, so you can tell which slot you’re using more easily. I really wish this had even a tiny/simple LED display, which would make things much easier. Also, pressing the save button to scroll through presets is easier than using the foot switches, in my opinion.
Interestingly, it comes with a 9V 300mA power supply. It’s fairly unusual for a pedal to ship with a power supply, so that’s nice. I did a few quick checks with a multimeter and oscilloscope, but not an in-depth analysis. The pedal draws a bit less than 200mA, but the actual consumption depends on channel selection. Typically it’s around 190mA, plus or minus a bit. With all settings at mid-point, the output peak-to-peak is about 500mV for single notes, and around 1V strumming. However, at max gain and volume, it peaks at about a 6.5V output. This is nice, because you can really use this higher voltage to drive a tube amp or some distortion pedals pretty hard, if that’s your thing.
I know some people are very particular about their cab IRs, and the preset IR sounded fine to me, but I actually have been preferring to play with it off, since I like the sound of my own actual cab. Therefore, I haven’t messed around with the software much yet to change this.
In the end, this is a totally decent pre-amp with 14 pretty distinct sounds (from the factory presets). And, if you want to load a preferred cab IR, you can. Yes, you can load only one per 7-preset bank, and the cab is either all-on or all-off for the entire pedal, but personally I am not too upset about this. I am knocking off one star for the price, however. I think this is a bit expensive for just a preamp pedal, even if it does have 14 slots and some IR modeling capability.
Final Rating: 4 Stars. It’s great, but has some limitations (mostly IR cab related), and is a bit on the expensive side which lost it one value-related star.
