Are you what your price says you are?

I'm on a budget when it comes to buying my pedals, so lately i've been looking at joyo. they sound like really well made clones, but the price worries me.:confused: Are they a good bet in the long run? Right now i like the sweet baby, american sound, and british sound. If you know of any other inexpensive good pedals please leave suggestions below

get a klon centaur-best bang for your buck IMO










:lol:

Boss, MXR, old DOD. They may not have the coolest looking enclosures, though I like the simplicity of MXR, the new industrial look of the BOSS, and the colors used on the old DOD's, but they sound real good and will last. Biyang makes good stuff, very good production quality. China is in their Golden era of production. Catch it while it lasts.

get a klon centaur-best bang for your buck IMO










:lol:

I lol'd

The old DOD pedals are great and they can be scooped up relatively cheaply on ebay. You just have to weed through the sea of dreamers out there trying to get $200 for a "vintage" DOD pedal. :-)

get a klon centaur-best bang for your buck IMO

:lol:

Or a Vintage TS808 or Triangle/Rams head big muff.

I just got the joyo vintage overdrive and like it so far. They have yet to last for years and years but... so far so good. Danelectro tuna melt is my favorite tremolo... danelectro also makes an excellent eq pedal. boss od3...

Others with more technical knowledge may be able to shed a bit more light, but I recently bought 3 Joyo pedals. Like you, I have a niggling concern for their longevity in the back of my mind, but in reality I am pleasantly surprised at how well built they seem to be. The 'lifetime test' is still a lifetime away, but for the money, I don't think you'd be making an unwise investment at this point.

As far as budget to value goes I do like cheap pedals. I could afford more expensive pedals but its hard to justify any expensive gear when its just my hobby. I have a demanding job, two kids and a wife so the money always goes somewhere. I am just a bedroom picker.

I recently picked up a Joyo Vintage OD and a GFS Brownie. The OD I liked instantly and it was easy to find good tone. The Brownie takes a little more adjustment to find the right sounds.

I'm itching to get another Joyo pedal but I think its just because the price is so darn attractive.

Joyo Tremolo - 1st one was fried on arrival, but seller made good. Current one sounds great. Love the bulldog graphic.

Joyo American Sound - Truly sounds great, but the Bass pot on mine has a VERY LOUD pop around 3:00. I use it for direct recording (i.e. headphone monitoring) so that pop can be a problem. I'll try some DeoxIT and see if that helps.

Compared to my MXR, EHX and Fulltone pedals, there is a clear difference in build quality with Joyo being the low-end. But, I think the Joyo pedals are priced accordingly among the options.

Others with more technical knowledge may be able to shed a bit more light, but I recently bought 3 Joyo pedals. Like you, I have a niggling concern for their longevity in the back of my mind, but in reality I am pleasantly surprised at how well built they seem to be.

I have one Joyo, 3 Biyangs, and a few of the things like the "cheapo MXR's" made for GC and such.

The budget MXR's have the best build quality IMO, but the bypass switching is the same old "could be better" type. What is more important is with the new type of jacks that don't really have nuts on them but instead are like "studs" that feed into a plastic threaded bore, the MXR's have the best of the "budget stuff." And Dunlop has basically just allowed for their modern production to apply to these MXR's. So even though it is not a strain-free assembly, it fits together as well as is possible.

The Biyang pedals are next. There is some slop with how things fit, so they came up with enclosures that have elongated slots for the pots and such. In order to get everything to line up, they had to put nuts on the inside of the box, so there is no room for washers. While the pots in the cheap MXR's are kind of like a step down from Boss and such, the ones in the Biyangs are another step or two down in quality, IMO.

...The Biyangs are a neat combination of SMT and traditional "thru hole" construction in many cases, whereas many of the MXR's I'm talking about are 100% SMT. There is nothing wrong with SMT when discussing longevity/durability. The Biyang stuff also uses the excellent millenium bypass method - same thing you will find on pricier pedals like the MXR Carbon Copy. Really good IMO.

The Joyo quality IMO comes up in 3rd place in this scenario. The slop/alignment with getting the pieces into the box is on the lower end. As a result, the jack "lugs" should really never be more than hand tightened, ever. And if your cords get hung up when you pop one in the pedal, you need to actually hand loosen the lug.

My particular Joyo pedal has buffered bypass with a true bypass switch. There's really nothing wrong with buffered bypass per se, but a different type of switch that is more durable might as well be used. I actually just bypassed all the buffering and installed a replacement 3PDT "Taiwan blue."

The soldering on the Biyang boards with thru hole components is just barely fair. Bottom line with that is there should be no problems down the line. The soldering on the Joyo boards with thru hole components is not as good as the Biyangs IMO, and the boards are kind of "funky dirty" leaving the factory, and (while there is no sonic advantage IMO) the Biyangs use nice German-type box caps. The Joyos use these super cheap little burgundy things that are supposed to look like the premium Panasonic or Cornell-Dubillier "gumdrop caps."

So compared to something like a Boss pedal, these three will most likely have input and output jack failures. I have already witnessed D.C. jack failures on both the Biyang and Joyo stuff. If someone tries to service a Biyang pedal and they use a wrench on the in and out jacks, they will probably strip a stud off. The Joyos should never have the studs loosened/tightened with any tool other than fingers.

The Alps-style pots in the Biyang/Joyos will probably fail after 10 years or so in some instances, or at least develop problems with scratchiness/dropouts/etc. The strain with their pcb-mounted design will exacerbate this probably more than the lower quality of the pots. There are almost no mass produced pedals that have a really good quality of pot in it IMO, so it comes down to the construction. Ibanez/Boss use or used flying leads to the pots to remove any strain, so the pots last a really long time.

The "mechanical buffered bypass" in the Joyo is just kind of silly. IMO, it might as well just use what the old Boss/Ibanez did. Those switches last forever because they are just momentary types.

...Someone mentioned old DOD. As much as I like them, the buffered bypass in them (and Danelectro pedals that are not true bypass) is not quite as good as Boss/Ibanez/etc. IMO.

If the cheaper MXR pedals can be modified for millenium bypass and the stock circuit is fine, they are probably the best bet. Even with their plastic shaft pots, I can see them outlasting the Joyo/Biyang ones.

I would personally go with the Biyang Tonefancier/Baby Boom line because of the millenium bypass and evidence of slightly cleaner factory assembly. And the jacks really should last just a bit longer.

If a Joyo is going to be modified for proper true bypass, it might make sense to replace the jacks with something that can be tightened with something beyond your fingers. That brings me to the little bit of wiring that is in the Joyos with their "ribbon cables" that run to the footswitch - there will probably be quite a few failures with those. Joyo simply tacks the wires on top instead of actually running them thru holes in the circuitboards, and they use some kind of funky low temp insulation wire - the insulation burns up when the heat that is necessary to work with lead free solder is used. The Biyangs use a "rigid pin standoff" setup that does not require wires. The MXR's incorporate the switch right into the main circuitboard, which means there will probably be a stress failure and one or more of the switch pin mounts will possibly tear a circuitboard trace. This has already been witnessed in stuff like the first versions of Visual Sound pedals, which were redesigned to have a super long life switch setup to replace the old mechanical one.

While a bit of this requires speculation on my part, most of it comes from just observing similar construction techniques of prior pedals by other companies. But something like the jacks on especially the Joyos can probably be predicted to fail with some degree of accuracy, since you really can't do any more than hand tighten the lugs. Maybe they can get them to line up better at the factory, but once they have been used a bit and everything flexes/shifts around, the mechanical parts of the pedal will be in "eventual failure mode."

My advice is just to buy a spare or two since the price is low, or get ready for some repairs/mods/reverse engineering at some point in the future. As long as you have a plan, you s/b fine. IMO. I love my Compress X more than many Dyna Comp clones costing 2X/3X/more.

DOD meant Dead On Delivery. Ha. Just kidding! Although, I am still shocked to see DOD 250s costing as much as they do. Behold the power of Yngwie! The reason we bought them is that they were cheap. Plus, the parts counts were minimal so they are easy to fix.

^ Thanks 11 Gauge!

Glad to hear the Compress X is bit more reliable. I have one of those too, and have plenty of use for it.

I'll let that niggling worry stay then, but really part of the purchase of the Joyos was to get an idea of how the originals sounded (I bought the Ultimate Drive and Sweet Baby, along with the vintage OD for yet another tubescreamer variant to mess with:roll:), so if one dies, I'll know whether or not to get the real deal at full price! I've spent far too much on pedals lately, so I think of it as like checking out youtube to make sure I actually like a record before buying it.

And if the Vintage OD dies I'll have a pre-drilled, painted enclosure into which I can scratch build an 808 clone (I've already got the vero board layout done). Thanks for the review, now I know what to watch for.

DOD meant Dead On Delivery. Ha. Just kidding! Although, I am still shocked to see DOD 250s costing as much as they do. Behold the power of Yngwie! The reason we bought them is that they were cheap. Plus, the parts counts were minimal so they are easy to fix.

My oldest pedal on board is a DOD classic Fuzz. The innards might not be recognizable as such, but somewhere in there is a DOD FX52. It has been to war and back, and has maintained its sound.

Also, I meant to tell the OP Biyang, not Joyo. I have never played or seen a Joyo, but the Biyang stuff is pretty cool. My stepson has the BabyBoom Fuzz Star and the chorus pedal.

Also check out Artec. They are the OEm for lots of companies and I have used some of their stuff for the last 10 years or so(Parametric EQ and Firebird style mini-humbucker.