Bought it on Thursday, took it to rehearsal today.
<3 <3 <3
My Stiletto does very good clean and excellent heavy crunch. I wanted something to get the "in between" light/medium crunch, like a cranked Deluxe or JTM 45. The Distortron does exactly that, and it does it better than any other pedal I've heard. It can do higher gain stuff too if need be, but I like it as a medium gain pedal.
The Distortron is the little brother of the legendary Box of Rock. It's basically the distortion side of the BoR with a couple of tweaks. There's a low/high gain switch. On low gain it's the same as the BoR; high gain piles on some more juice and takes this baby into hot-rodded Marshall territory.
The Subs switch solves a problem a lot of people have with the BoR: too much low end. At 3 you get the gigantic lows the BoR is known for. 2 gives a moderate low end cut that works well with modern high gain amps that already have tons of lows, and 1 cuts a lot of the lows for a nice tight crunch. I find the Stiletto likes the pedal on 2 best: 3 is a bit flubby, and 1 is not fat enough. Your amp may vary, and that's why the switch is there.
When I demo'd the pedal in the store, I played it through a Hot Rod DeVille. It sounded damn good there, but it sounds friggin' incredible through the Stiletto. Based on this and on the things I've read, I gather that the BoR and the Distortron like EL34 amps best. I've also tried a BoR through a Traynor YCV-50blue, which also sounded incredible and also has EL34's.
My only complaints relate to the enclosure layout, and I guess you could say this about any ZVex pedal really. My big clumsy feet don't do to well with the switch so close to the knobs. I also don't like the DC jack being so close to the input jack. I had to put it in a less than ideal spot on my pedal board to ensure the input plug didn't block the DC jack.
Anyway, the Distortron is my dream pedal for adding a third tone to my two channel amp. It has a "real amp" feel to it that you only get from a high quality pedal. It breathes, grunts, and sings like a cranked tube amp would. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a Marshall-in-a-box type of thing, or anyone looking to make their small clean amp sound like a big, cranked stack.
