Re: Strymon Mobius vs nova system
I love my Mobius, but it does take a bit of tweaking. Most of the presets out of the box are very 'full on' and digital sounding, and it takes a little bit of playing with the mix and level settings on some of them before you get it sounding natural. The most brilliant thing that Strymon pedals do is how they have an analog dry-signal, but they are able to very naturally mix the sounds together at the output. (as opposed to the TC Electronic way of 'analog dry through' where often you end up hearing your dry sound with the processed sound floating above it. It doesn't feel as natural to me)
The pedal is best served by people who have some experience with the analog versions of the effects first: I couldn't for the life of me get a decent sound out of the phaser in it until I had a chance to play around with an Orange 90 and a PH-2 for a few hours. That experience made the difference for getting a more natural sound.
The Mobius is also chock-full of features that go above and beyond the standard multi-fx. The filter setting is magical, and allows you to get all sorts of auto-wah, synthey, bubbly effects. When playing live I have 6 presets set up, and 4 of them are various Filter sounds, I would justify owning the Mobius for the filter alone. The Quadrature is a freakish effect that goes between ring modulator, shooting stars, or you can set it up with an envelope filter and have phasers, vibes, trems or chorus sounds linked to your pick attack. Destroyer is a bit crusher with all kinds of filters and ways to destroy your signal fidelity, whether you want to sound like you're being played on an old record, or though an 8 bit NES file or even through a crappy megaphone.
I fully agree with Red Label on his last point, that a grand majority of players will be better served by buying high quality versions of their favourite effect types. If you need a multi-fx for gigging purposes then the Mobius is great, but the main audience that I would suggest it to are the experimentalists, the guys who look at it and go 'Hey it can do a 12 stage phaser with an uneven sine wave', and the ones who think they can make great use out of it's weirder tonal engines.
