Harley Benton Crunch Distortion

I play rock pop punk and work as a music producer for many years, I don?t use pedals but straight amp sounds. I got this to use it mainly as a booster occasionally. So I did some tests:

I first tried it on a MOOER LITTLE MONSTER AC, it had a pleasant sound, not something extremely wow in comparison to the distortion sound of my big tube amplifier, but very very fun to play!
Then I tried it on the MARSHALL JCM 2000 DSL50 on the clean channel with the gain pretty low...it was just horrible, like a cheap digital fuzz-distortion pedal (it was good for some stoner stuff though lol). Everything changed when I turned the gain knob up (still on the clean channel at 5-8/10), so I had a soft tube distortion and with the pedal engaged I could get a similar tone to the one from the lead channel of the DSL50! I was very impressed, gave me inspiration to play more riffs and stuff!!
Later on I tried it on an ORANGE TINY TERROR as a tubescreamer style booster, I got some very interesting sounds once again that were fun to play.
My friend who is a fender amp user played it on a good FENDER tube combo and liked it very much being surprised about it.
Lastly I tried it on a LINE6 SPIDER combo but didn?t like it much...(I don?t think any other pedal could have sounded much better on that)

Something else that worths mentioning, is that it has a very good note definition, most distortion/overdrive pedals I?ve played (marshall, boss etc) won?t let you hear the higher strings in a chord if the lower strings are playing, this one lets you hear it all!

So my conclusion is that it plays BEST on tube amps that have already a little bit of tube distortion, or as a tubescreamer style booster before your crunch or distorted sound!
It might be cheap but on a good setup it can sound very expensive, recommended!

This pedal is great for bass.
In front of an amp it tends to cut a bit too much of the low end for my tastes, but it still works really well.
Where it really shines is when run in a parallel FX loop though.
We run this pedal in the FX loop of my Hartke HA3500 which allows us to dial in everything from brutal distortion to just the right amount of grit, for a more overdriven sound.
I was honestly surprised by how great it sounds when we first tried it out.

If no amp with a parallel loop is available I'm certain similar (or even better) results could be achieved by either splitting the signal before the pedal and feed it to a separate amp, or run the clean signal through a PA to retain low end.
Our better yet, use a pedal like the Tri Parallel Mixer from Electro Harmonix to achieve the same result as the parallel FX loop.

Worth mentioning is that we use this pedal with different bass guitars that are all 4-strings tuned down to B standard.
With other distortions (lite the Rat), it is really hard to dial in a sound that sounds good on both the low B string and the remaining ones but with the Crunch Distortion it's a breeze.

My one gripe about the pedal is that it feels a bit cheap, but on the other hand it feels sturdier than the cheap Behringer pedals.
We've used the pedal for rehearsal and recording for almost a year and a half now though and it still works without issue.

Although the title of the review may sound a tad negateve, don't worry, it is not a bad pedal! The word crunch usually gives me some associations with the lower or mid gain sounds. This one goes to more of a higher gain levels. Of course you can back off the gain, but still, expect much more of it than the name may suggest. There should be a trim pot inside that adjust the presence to suit various amplifiers. However getting into it is quite a pain, so maybe it would be better to make the trim pot more accessible