Extensive compressor reviews and FAQ

TC Electronic Sustain + Parametric EQ: The short version: just avoid this reissue pedal, do not buy it.
 
The long version: I bought the reissue because I liked the sound quality of the original version so much, and several people had asked me whether the reissue was as good, or close. Unfortunately the pedal is barely functional. Both the sustain and the noise gate only begin to engage at the maximum clockwise position of their knobs, which renders the pedal useless. Naturally I thought it was defective, so I exchanged it for another one, which turned out to behave exactly the same.
 
I got into a long and unpleasant interaction with TC's customer support over this. I just wanted to know whether the pedals I got were defective, or if they were made this way. TC Americas blew me off completely, for weeks, and when I pressed them for information they said they had never even heard of this pedal, and that if I didn't like it I should just take it back to the store I bought it from. At first TC Denmark wasn't very helpful either, saying they had no information about it other than that it was an old design that had been discontinued. I couldn't believe that TC had no information at all about their own pedal, and that their only "help" was to tell me to send the pedal back to the retailer, and let them deal with it. Of course the people handling customer support emails are not always competent, so I asked to talk to the CS manager on the US site. Unfortunately he was an absolute jerk to me--he has no business being in customer service at all. So I raised a stink about this whole debacle on various websites, and eventually TC Denmark's VP of product management got in touch with me. He was able to answer my questions in a helpful, friendly, and respectful manner. His techs were able to find one of these and test it out, and he got me their findings in a short amount of time.
 
The answer is that these reissue Sustain+Para pedals were made by a low-budget outsourced factory, not by TC themselves; and the techs at TC Denmark think the whole batch seems to have "gone bad". This pedal was discontinued a couple years ago, and now it is in a limbo where on the one hand you will still see them for sale "new" in some places, but on the other hand TC wants nothing to do with them, and TC cannot help if you buy one that doesn't work. So, bottom line: just pretend this pedal doesn't exist.
 

 
 
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