Boss md500 vs strymon mobius

thomasw88

had a mobius for a us for a couple of years now and its great..

Just contemplating changing as I fancy something new..

anyone had both?. Which  did you prefer and why?

Gassage

Yes. MD500 by a long way. No sterility, no muffling of signal when on bypass, much nicer settings.

I personally think the mobius is dreadful....the MD500 acceptable.

meltedbuzzbox

The Boss MD500 is a real hit and miss pedal.

Some sounds are brilliant, vibrato and Dimension spring instantly to mind. The CE-1 isnt bad and the MO-2 is pretty good, Rotary is good. The slicer is great but absolutely hideous to set up. 
Some are truly awful, phaser, filter and flanger spring instantly to mind

The menu/UI system is horribly clunky and the midi side of things is a bit wank. The dual effect thing has it's compromises. 
Did I mention the menu is terrible?
There is an app that makes tweaking less painful. 

I just checked my emails and I am surprised I paid £304 18 months ago for mine. 
A combination of laziness and an unwillingness to go on a tone quest is the only reason I haven't replaced it. 
Its not worth the retail price for me. 

thomasw88

I use chorus, tremolo flanger phaser and a rotary sound. 

vasselmeyer

I have the BOSS GT-1000 which has the MD-500 algorithms in it. I also have a Mobius in my pedalboard. TBH, you can get them sounding identical with a little tweaking. There really isn't much in it apart from the fact the BOSS can do two patches at the same time. If you just want something new or two sounds at once, go for it, otherwise spend your money on something new.

Pablocrackers

Love the Mobius never had any issues with tone, sounds great to me

hotpickups

I had a mobius with no issues whatsoever. The option to be able to experiment by running to algos at the same time would've been nice but not sure how one would use it a live setting but never say never . Depends on what sound you find I guess

Maybe its this reason why a few mobius's come up for sale more than the Boss units do but I'm sure you couldn't tell them apart in reality  

preston61

I've had both recently, I'd hoped that having a big box modulation unit would help with board space, however I'll be sticking with individual units and taking the real estate hit.

Out of the box the Mobius sounds a lot better, more musical (apologies for the cliché). The Boss can sound just as good, however you have to be willing to put in the time and edit until the early hours of the morning to make it the case. I also would say it's the most straight forward of interfaces with all the sub menus

On the flip side, some of the combinations you can put together with the MD 500 are awesome. Stacking the Overtone and rotary setting really captures that Hammond setting, and adding one of the slicer settings to anything is a lot of fun. The dimension chorus is lovely.

Basically, a combination of the 2 would've been the ideal. 2 independent mod sounds from the 500 and the strymon interface with a mixture of the 2 companies algorithms would be the one to end all