NPD: Catalinbread Naga Viper MKII

[Supernautilus]

Just picked up one of these this week. Very cool pedal. I don't have much experience with treble boosters. The only one I'm familiar with is the one built into my Strymon Sunset, so I compared the two. They both do a similar thing, but I definitely heard differences. The Naga is also analog while the Sunset is digital, so that's a factor for sure.

The Naga has much more gain on tap, thanks to the Heat knob. Combined with the Boost level and Attenuation knob, you can really dial in the gain characteristics. Meanwhile, the Sunset treble booster setting never gets very dirty, even with the gain knob maxed.

The Sunset is also MUCH brighter, which surprised me. It's nearly all treble, unless you roll the tone knob back. The Naga seems to round off the upper highs slightly. In a good way, though. The Naga seems to emphasize the upper mids more than it does actual "treble". But again, it does this is a good way that makes it sound warm, but not dark.

Overall, I'm glad I picked it up. I've tried running it into two different preamps and it makes them sound great. This will be my second Catalinbread pedal after the SFT, and I've been impressed both times. Good stuff.

 

[Hsb]

Been thinking about a treble booster and this one is on the list, thank you for the review.

 

[jeremy]

i liked the old one, seems like the new one might be even better. the range knob makes all the difference. if you roll the heat knob all the way down, and the range knob all the way up, that would be close to an actual rangemaster i think

 

[Chistopher]

I'll have to look into this. I've been wanting a treble booster.

 

[hamerfan]

I built a Naga viper Mark 1 some years ago, but didn‘t like the overall sound. A bit too strident and harsh imo. Its a low parts device, which can easily analysized and altered.
So i breadboarded it. I used a lower gain Germanium transistor - not too much difference but a tad smoother. The collector voltage was 7.8 volts, which is quite high. I reduced it to 6.5 volts - it became clearer with humbuckers. I used an additional cap of 10nF in parallel to the output pull down resistor, it smoothed the sound considerably.

It would be interesting to know what was changed in Mark 2 besides the new attn knob.

 

[Supernautilus]

I built a Naga viper Mark 1 some years ago, but didn‘t like the overall sound. A bit too strident and harsh imo. Its a low parts device, which can easily analysized and altered.
So i breadboarded it. I used a lower gain Germanium transistor - not too much difference but a tad smoother. The collector voltage was 7.8 volts, which is quite high. I reduced it to 6.5 volts - it became clearer with humbuckers. I used an additional cap of 10nF in parallel to the output pull down resistor, it smoothed the sound considerably.

It would be interesting to know what was changed in Mark 2 besides the new attn knob.

That’s interesting. I’m not familiar with the MKI but, as I mentioned, the MKII was warmer than I expected for something called a “treble booster”. Rolling back the ATTN knob mellows it out even further, putting it more in line with a traditional overdrive tone. It’s quite versatile in this regard.

 

[hamerfan]

In fact its not a treble booster, its a dirty boost with a bass dumper dialable between 34 (only lows below that are dumped with 3db to ground) and 709 Hertz.