RIP Plutoneium

Fusionista

Must say I remain very happy with my Chi-Wah-Wah.  I used to think it had a bit of a harsh edge, but according to my fans the tone sounds amazing in a live performance mix. http://plutoneium.wordpress.com/

Forge

It is always bad when an innovative company shuts down...the Chi is a good product and I do hope someone buys the name and schematics. Mind you, it is probably wasted money if copies start turning up.

vasselmeyer

What a shame. Love my Chi. I hope someone picks up their portfolio and IP.

Fusionista

For two pins I'd move out to Singapore and start driving it... 

timmysoft

Probably the first of many. Sadly people are buying joyos, mooers and other copy pedals because the pricing is so competitive. I hope someone buys the rights and the company name can live on.

Heartfeltdawn

Gratuitous picture needed, I feel. 

http://plutoneium.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dsc_45691.jpg

Forge

Part of the assets?

Forge

timmysoft said:

Probably the first of many. Sadly people are buying joyos, mooers and other copy pedals because the pricing is so competitive. I hope someone buys the rights and the company name can live on.

...if more of the makers disappears there will be very very few new products to keep us excited. I tried a couple of Mooers and felt that the space saving and the money saving did not justify the loss of tone. Off they went to greener pastures.

Dave_Mc

timmysoft said:

Probably the first of many. Sadly people are buying joyos, mooers and other copy pedals because the pricing is so competitive. I hope someone buys the rights and the company name can live on.

I didn't want to see them go either, but the thing is (a) I don't need anything new to keep me excited (OK so that was Forge's point, but still), (b) a lot of the expensive stuff (not plutoneium, I don't think) is derivative too and (c) if Mooer, Joyo and the like didn't exist I wouldn't be buying very many super expensive pedals, anyway. I don't use pedals all that much, and most of my cheapo pedals were little more than impulse buys, because they were cheap enough that I felt "What else am I going to do with £25?". For example, I bought the Suhr Riot clone because it was around £25. There's no way I'd pay £200 for a real Riot, because at that kind of money I'd just use my high gain amps for that type of tone.

How come people don't complain about the Suhr Riot undercutting high gain tube amp manufacturers and putting them out of business?

Heartfeltdawn

Forge said:

...if more of the makers disappears there will be very very few new products to keep us excited. I tried a couple of Mooers and felt that the space saving and the money saving did not justify the loss of tone. Off they went to greener pastures.

Really the market is so saturated that there is very little new that can be done. It's noticeable how the boutique market on Ebay has really dropped off since the recession and I think the emergence of Mooer especially has done a lot to facilitate that. People are choosing the cheaper option. From what I've seen, (and believe me I am obsessive with the listings!) very few boutique brands are fetching a higher price than they were five years ago. Even the Cornish stuff is coming in cheaper. Brands like Skreddy, Paul C's Tim, and many others are 25% to 40% cheaper now than the real boom period. A look at the current sold listings with the most expensive first sees one DAM pedal, three Klon Centaurs, and a Mu-tron phaser up there. 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/Effects-Pedals-/41410/i.html?LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&LH_PrefLoc=1&_sop=3

As the boutique prices have dropped, so the market for the old Boss pedals has risen. Boss is the new boutique!

£1500 for a fucking Klon. Ridiculous. 

Forge

To me Boss are the Ronseal pedals really, efficient but not exciting. They still innovate though and on the used market their delays and modulations are hard to beat.

I do agree with you about the Klon prices - I can't speak badly about DAM , I love their gear - I have seen one of their Tonebender MKII replicas going for $2000 is the USA though but even David Main's gadgets are difficult to sell at the moment

ThePrettyDamned

This is all true.

I think knowledge is helping, too - way back when, I'd trust mag reviews, which are clouded by cost (200 quid clean boosts are always amazing, 50 quid ones are bland when they might have identical parts and circuits). I even remember someone saying my boss ds-1 sounded digital, because they assumed cheap boss must be digital and they preferred 'all analogue' tone. That was quite a few years back... And it didn't sound digital at all!

People are more educated now, and if they want a punt on a booteek pedal, there is probably a clone that gets you there as a taster.

I would love for more boutique folks to use soft switching, like boss, Digitech, visual sound etc- they boast reliable, but many use true bypass and a mechanical switch, which will inevitably fail at some point.

Heartfeltdawn

Forge said:

To me Boss are the Ronseal pedals really, efficient but not exciting. They still innovate though and on the used market their delays and modulations are hard to beat.

I do agree with you about the Klon prices - I can't speak badly about DAM , I love their gear - I have seen one of their Tonebender MKII replicas going for $2000 is the USA though but even David Main's gadgets are difficult to sell at the moment

That's why I like Boss pedals so much. You use some brands and their particular sounds takes over. Then it becomes in exercise in soundmaking rather than music with some sonic signature (this is where I end up in Pseud's Corner!). A lot of very expensive pedals, particular delay pedals, really turned me off. Something like the DD-7 which does pretty much everything well does the trick. 

I know for me I was at my best playing and creating stuff when I had two Peavey Bandits, a Boss GT-3, a Diamond compressor, and a RAT2. The £4K pedalboard was great for noise but too many options and the creativity lost out. 

Another aspect that has helped drop prices in the UK is the rise of the small pedal builder. Five years ago they were in very short supply. Now you can go through the Ebay pedals pages and find a clone of just about everything. People like JuanSolo, Made by Mike, Tim Hulio, Monkey FX when Andi was going, all of them make excellent stuff that was usually cheaper than a corresponding American made pedal. Boutique hasn't had its day but the bubble is definitely over and has been for some time.

ThePrettyDamned

It always amazes me that, for about 250 quid, I could have a juansolo pedalboard in a box, complete with reliable switching.

If possible, I'd love for independent manufacturers to use boss style soft switching, just to reduce mechanical failure. I've had pedals (high quality ones, not cheapies) where the switch has gone... Home use only! So for gigging, especially when I first start, I'm going to be soft switching only and as few pedals as possible - wah, od, delay, reverb and chorus. I could probably drop od if I had the right amp. I just can't be bothered with an expensive hand made pedal to fail because it has a mechanical switch, regardless of quality.

Not so bad if I had money for backups, but I won't.

Dave_Mc

ThePrettyDamned said:

(a) I think knowledge is helping, too - way back when, I'd trust mag reviews, which are clouded by cost (200 quid clean boosts are always amazing, 50 quid ones are bland when they might have identical parts and circuits). I even remember someone saying my boss ds-1 sounded digital, because they assumed cheap boss must be digital and they preferred 'all analogue' tone. That was quite a few years back... And it didn't sound digital at all!

(b) People are more educated now, and if they want a punt on a booteek pedal, there is probably a clone that gets you there as a taster.

(c) I would love for more boutique folks to use soft switching, like boss, Digitech, visual sound etc- they boast reliable, but many use true bypass and a mechanical switch, which will inevitably fail at some point.

(a) LOL

And I think digitech really gets the short end of the stick when it comes to people thinking analogue stuff is digital... )

(b) That's a good point- people act like the cheap pedals only lose the boutique guys money, and while I'm not going to pretend it probably doesn't lose them some sales, it may well gain them some sales, too, at least for the more obscure stuff which is hard to get to try. For example, I'd never even have considered a Timmy as they were so hard to get and I wasn't waiting a couple of years for something I'd never tried and might never use or even like- but now I've tried the cheapo danelectro clone, I'm considering getting the real thing (if I can ever find one in stock ) ). If people try the cheaper version and like it, they might get the dearer one eventually.

Even aside from that, the fact that a cheaper manufacturer thinks it's worth its while to clone a boutique pedal sort of means that pedal has "made it" as a classic- which might turn more players on to trying the "real thing" too.

(c) Agreed. Alongside good-sounding, quiet, unity gain buffers. A fair amount of the time I find myself passing on Boss pedals because of the buffer more than because of how the effect sounds ) Not saying I like all Boss pedals, but there are a fair few that I like and might have bought but the worry about the buffer made me have second thoughts...

ThePrettyDamned

Yeah, see my recent thread on the sd-1... Luckily, it's easily sorted (put it after another buffered pedal) but surely it's so easy to fix and would cost very little to do, and it would make the 39 quid pedal worth at least 45! I know I'd get it...

As it stands, I'm looking to try a bad monkey and Digitech screaming blues in an a/b. If it sounds the same (I stack on top of gain rather than standalone), I'll be getting the Digitech.

Sorry boss the sd-1 does something to pinch harmonics my tube screamer doesn't though, which is why I want it...

dindude

There is no intimation in the Plutonium statement that cheap-shit chinese competition killed their business. In fact the only direct competition to the Chi I can think of is the AMT wah. They even say that they were still making a profit, although they obviously don't state how much. Joyo killing boutique makers is entirely in the heads of those posting in this thread. Me no understand how we got to this point?

The boutique market is very saturated, but there are still plenty of people / small businesses making a (Probably modest) living out if it.

Heartfeltdawn

@dindude

Nobody said Joyo was killing off boutique makers. I said that the Mooer and Joyo explosion had undoubtedly reduced the amount of people who were buying boutique pedals. That would be suggested by the reduced amount of boutique gear on Ebay now. People have less cash to spend, the VAT/postage increases in recent years made importing pedals less attractive (just as the MIJ guitar market on UK Ebay has really tailed off) and the cheap clones have taken off. 

It'd be interesting knowing what UK builders do make in terms of wage per annum. 

timmysoft

Heartfeltdawn said:

@dindude

Nobody said Joyo was killing off boutique makers. I said that the Mooer and Joyo explosion had undoubtedly reduced the amount of people who were buying boutique pedals. That would be suggested by the reduced amount of boutique gear on Ebay now. People have less cash to spend, the VAT/postage increases in recent years made importing pedals less attractive (just as the MIJ guitar market on UK Ebay has really tailed off) and the cheap clones have taken off. 

It'd be interesting knowing what UK builders do make in terms of wage per annum. 

Agreed. I'm not saying competition got the better of plutonium, but the perception of value I think would have had a big hand in it.

Forge

All this Boss talk convinced me to get a cheap one and hotrod it...

Dave_Mc

ThePrettyDamned said:

(a) Yeah, see my recent thread on the sd-1... Luckily, it's easily sorted (put it after another buffered pedal) but surely it's so easy to fix and would cost very little to do, and it would make the 39 quid pedal worth at least 45! I know I'd get it...

(b) As it stands, I'm looking to try a bad monkey and Digitech screaming blues in an a/b. If it sounds the same (I stack on top of gain rather than standalone), I'll be getting the Digitech.

(c) Sorry boss the sd-1 does something to pinch harmonics my tube screamer doesn't though, which is why I want it...

(a) LOL. And yeah, that's the reason I got my Daphon- while the Boss is still arguably pretty decent value at ~£40, I didn't want to pay £40 for something which might have bypass bleed and which might be a pain to get round (I couldn't guarantee that I'd definitely have a buffer in front of it and I have little enough space on my pedalboard without putting an extra extraneous pedal there, and that's before you consider the extra cost ) ). At that time I didn't know if the Daphon version had bleed (it doesn't seem to, but I admit I haven't exactly done exhaustive scientific tests, either ) ), but if it did I'd only paid a third as much.

(b) I'm guessing you mean the BM versus a TS and a SB versus a BD2? I'd be interested to hear what you think, too. I've tried my bad monkey versus my joyo TS clone, and I think the Joyo sounds very slightly better. Though I have two Joyos- one Joyo and one harley benton- and they both sound sliightly different too, so it may just be component tolerances, unless they changed the circuit or something like that. But to my ears the bad monkey sounds very slightly muffled compared to the Joyo- slightly more compressed/muffled, like there's a very thin blanket over it. Granted, it has the bass control which means it's a lot more versatile than the Joyo, and I'd also trust its reliability a lot more than the Joyo. And, at least to my ears, to be fair you'd only notice it if you tried the two head to head. But yeah... I also suspect the Ibanez TS9 or 808 might sound slightly better than the Joyo, too.

(c) Daphon? )

Heartfeltdawn said:

@dindude

That would be suggested by the reduced amount of boutique gear on Ebay now. People have less cash to spend, the VAT/postage increases in recent years made importing pedals less attractive (just as the MIJ guitar market on UK Ebay has really tailed off) and the cheap clones have taken off.

Another thing that isn't helping is the weaker pound (though admittedly it's not quite as weak as a while back).

It also makes you wonder how useful a lot of the boutique stuff is- I'm not saying that people sometimes don't kid themselves that the cheaper stuff is "just as good", but at the same time some (other) people kid themselves that the dearer stuff is always better, and that's not always true, either. Certainly in the case of something like a glorified tubescreamer...

Incidentally, a wah is actually one of the things which I actually would kind of be willing to pay a bit more for... you seem to have to pay a bit more for decent ones. As opposed to, say, ODs, where you can get 95% of the way there a lot of the time for a fraction of the cost.