Re: Pedals with tubes in them?
As mentioned, the cool thing about tube pedals is that if they're too soggy for your taste, you can use a lower gain tube. And if it sounds harsh with a particular tube, you can try one with a different flavor. Lots of NOS tubes to be had, and great vintage 12AT7s & 12AU7s are generally cheaper than 12AX7s because there's far less demand for 'em.
I have an old Butler-designed PureTube Smooth pedal, it's got 3-band EQ which is handy. The Butler circuits use a starved-tube design which vastly extends tube life. Mine was intended as a low-to-medium gain pedal and it works quite well but I haven't been using it much. It's aptly named though, smooth and liquid tone.
Have heard good things about the English Muff'n but never played one myself. Word is, the trick to a classic British sound on those is to start with the tone controls all at zero and only increase them if you need more in a particular area. Kind of counterintuitive but it's said to keep the gain from getting too hairy. There's a used one for sale over on TGP I think. But even new they're not that expensive.
The thing about sag is that I think you generally get more from power tubes than preamp tubes. Even in full Recto mode my Triaxis doesn't produce much sag compared to a set of 6L6s working hard. And Triaxis is far and away the best tube preamp I've ever encountered.
One small twin-tube tube unit I do really like is a Hughes & Kettner Cream Machine. I've had mine for about 25 years now and it's a real firebreather- used it for years as my feedback-on-demand box. The beauty of these is that they're designed using both halves of the first tube as preamp stages, and the second tube acts as a 1W power amp whose output is then stepped down. Fully driven tubes including a poweramp stage with its own level control. The thing can actually drive a speaker, not quite loud enough to jam with a band but loud enough to feed back. And there's a RedBox on one of the outputs in case you want to go direct. Very amplike indeed, with a pronounced Marshall tone. It's a half rack unit though, not a stompbox. But H & K really got it right. They made two other similarly-configured units in this series and all are quite good.
