To me it's just the front end of a budget level Crate or Peavey solid state amp. The EQ, while extremely powerful, is not user friendly. The parametric mid is either a win or lose adjustment, within millimeters one way or the other. It's hard to stop it from being piercing without killing off all the presence.
The distortion is extremely hyperactive, and it makes the pedal kind of addicting. You want to play through it, even though you know it's not a good, professional live sound. It's like candy that way. But not even ear candy, more like finger candy, because the notes rip off the guitar into total saturation. You can always tell what a pedal is doing by riding the gain knob to 0 and going up from there. The MZ is nothing but square wave chainsaw, and it can't clean up under lower gain or volume knob adjustments, because it is simply morphing your sound into a chainsaw.
It's like playing with the wah half way, and then trying to get the treble down at the amp. There's just no way you're going to make it sound like the wah is off. Or take a guitar with pickups out of phase. You can turn the bass up, boost the lower mids, but it's never going to sound like they're in phase. The MZ is the same way. It just distorts in this one-dimensional way. Not entirely unusable, but definitely in my book, it's ear candy for the "kids" and special fx noises for the brave/experimental/avante guard, but never a valid professional tone machine for the live or recording "main" guitar sound.
IMHO
Some things are just one trick ponies while other things can do a lot of things half assed. Things that do a lot of things really good are rare.
