New Gear Day (NGD): Daphon E20OD Overdrive pedal

Daphon E20OD Overdrive = cheap thrills

Since I’ve started modifying stomp boxes I’ve been on the lookout for cheap second hand pedals to tinker with. Then I stumbled on to Daphon’s range of cheap pedals.

Costing a lot less than a lot of second hand pedals I thought why not give them a go. I had read online that the Daphon E10OD and E20OD had got quite favourable reviews from people online.

It was discovered that these overdrive pedals had the same chip as the famous Ibanez TS-9 Tubescreamer. In fact Daphon built the old Ibanez “Soundtank” series of pedals back in the early nineties, which had a Tubescreamer in the range.

I figured with these things in mind it might be a worthwhile venture picking up one, and working on it. And hey, if I break it I’m not out that much money anyway!

I chose the E20D out of the two because it came with more solid components to work with. The “10” series Daphon pedals share a similar shaped enclosure to the old Ibanez “Soundtank” series, which I assumed also came with the garbage pots and jacks too.

The E20OD has a trio of regular pots, and the rest of the hardware definitely looks to be decent enough.

So it seems to be built quite solidly, but how does it sound?

Plugging in the E20OD I was greeted with a familiar trio of controls, and dialling up a decent overdrive tone wasn’t too hard. I’ll spend a bit more time testing it out before I write a proper review. Then after that it will be time to hack it up and hopefully create something special out of this cheap pedal.