Darkglass ADAM vs. Alpha Omega Photon

[archisland]

Did a video comparison between the Aggressively Distorting Advanced Machine and the Alpha Omega Photon!

Be warned, it’s a bit nerdy!



Hope that it’s helpful to someone!

 

[SpacemanBassman]

Thanks for posting this. Helpful indeed

 

[wvbass]

I watched the entire video. This helped me understand why I knew in 2 seconds that I wasn't keeping the ADAM, and why I love the Photon.

The ADAM's "character" makes me want to remove that artificial "warmth" (which would be great in some settings, but isn't what I want right now), and adding back in some mids that seem to disappear. The ADAM is also pretty completely a distortion pedal, and while it sounds great when I hear somebody else, that generally doesn't work for me.

The Photon mainly leaves me subtracting some mids to get to the tone I want. It benefits from a little bit of low end boost, but I've found that the cab sims take care of that. I prefer to subtract EQ, although I'm not bashful about boosting if that helps things. I find the Alpha channel to be more of an overdrive, so it can get fairly clean, breaking up more if I dig in more.

My two other takeaways from the video:

1. In the "my sound" section, the ADAM was dialed in to sound more like a Photon, and the Photon was dialed in to get closer to an ADAM sound. Interesting.
2. I really need to play with that studio setting. So far, I've mainly been recreating the sounds I get with my AO Ultra. The key difference between the Ultra and the Photon, for me, are the drive-only cab sims. They give you some additional EQ control over the drive sounds and can tame the brittle/harsh sounds the pedal can have when running direct.

 

[Ander87]

Just resucitating to say not enough people have thanked you for this video haha!

Great content - for me, I briefly had the AOP and felt it was too clanky and too metal-ly - I play punk-rock and do quite hi gain sounds for the genre; I had maxed out the distortion on the B7k and wanted more... and the AO is too much metal to my taste... I'm gonna give a shot to an ADAM that I've found pretty cheap (almost half price( since I do use fuzz too in some points and allegedly it's a more vintage cut...