Extensive compressor reviews and FAQ

Mooer Yellow: This is a micro-sized pedal from China, meant to imitate the Diamond CPR-1. Like the Diamond it is an optical circuit, has a tilting EQ, and is painted yellow.
 
The action is smooth and even, with no squishy effects. It has an inherently low ratio, so it is meant for general smoothing rather than peak limiting. Turning up the Comp knob boosts your signal over a fixed threshold. The noise level is very low at most settings. The EQ is just like the one in the Diamond: centered around 900 Hz, with a shallow arching slope on either side of that point, making it good for broad natural-sounding tonal changes.
 
The tone, unfortunately, is not close to the Diamond. It is more congested, and lacking in richness or shine. Whenever I played and heard a tone that sounded especially good, I looked down to note the setting and realized the pedal was switched off. To be clear though, the tone really isn't terrible--in fact it's decent for the price. But since it is supposedly a clone of the Diamond, I have to say it falls far short of that tonal quality.
 
It doesn't lose any highs, but the low end gets rolled off pretty noticeably. At some settings the lows are no worse than with any other typical guitar comp, but at others the cut is significant. The setting of the Comp knob also affects the amount of lows, as the whole signal gets boosted up across the threshold; so a high Comp setting will bring more of the lows back, but by the same token your dynamics are well smashed at that point. The setting closest to "flat", with the strongest low end, is with both Comp and EQ knobs at 2:00.
 
It runs on standard Boss-type 9V DC. The housing is tiny, about 40mm x 93mm, and the construction quality is decent for the price. The footswitch is "true bypass".
 

 
 
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