This obviously is an oddball and I do admit that this pedal came into my possession with the sole intent of passing it on to a guitar player, but it's here, so let's check it out!
I don't know too much about legendary guitar amps, but apparently this is the amp-in-a-box version of the Fender Tweed Deluxe. I don't know anything about that amp and old Fender amps look all the same to my untrained eye. The enclosure and control layout look like the DCX Bass. The whole pedal looks and feels like an Origin pedal. It's so high quality it's almost boring. Bent steel enclosure, luxurious knobs ... it's all top shelf stuff and you instantly get washed over with a feeling of holding a super high quality piece of audio equipment when you take it out of the box.
Four knobs, two switches. Did those old Fenders have gain and master volume? The Deluxe 55 does.
We get a simple three knob layout with Drive, Level and Tone. Furthermore, if the Origin Website tells the truth, it was somewhat of a common practice to roll the tubes in the preamp of the old Fender. It came equipped with 12AY7, which players swapped for 12AX7 - in my experience those generally offer a bit more gain and a have a brighter grit when driven while the 12AY7 are a bit more mellow and have less grit. The Deluxe 55 offers tube rolling with the flick of a switch - the left position is the original 12AY7, the right position does the swap to 12AX7.
There is one more switch and one more knob, and this is a bit of a party trick. The DCX Bass already offered something special, giving the player the option to roll off top end depending on the amount of distortion coming from the pedal. In this here case, they tried to take care of the classic problem you run into when you stack preamps: The EQ curves of the preamps stack as well. So when you use a device with a classic Fender tone stack that has bass and treble as boost only and mids as cut only, you'll end up with a scooped signal. Now run a Fender-Amp-In-A-Box pedal into that amp and you'll have way too much of a scoop. The second switch has three positions. The flat setting does nothing, as does the Post-EQ knob when the switch is in that position. The other two settings are meant for Fender and Marshall style amps. My guess is that the Deluxe 55 will counter the baked in tone curve of Fender or Marshall'esque amps and give you the option of using the pedal and amp combination as a two channel system instead of having to balance EQs and having to compromise on both ends.
Well, the only thing that interests me is how well it does on bass. The manual claims that the Tone knob controls the amount of treble and also boosts gain when set past 2 o'clock.
Of course I did measure what it does.
With Drive and Level at noon, sweeping through the tone knob in both the 12AX7 and 12AY7 position yields the following:
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On screen, this looks like a capable bass pedal. No signal loss in the lows - with the tone towards minimum, there's even a healthy bass boost going on.
. The description makes me think I’d like it more than I do, though. My dirt preferences are towards the completely broken but able to be implemented subtly, which is the sort of thing that your aging skateboarder analogy brings to my mind, at least. However, the Nobels sounds to my ear like a nice but fairly pedestrian overdrive, as if Magera had quit skateboarding when he was 27, got a junior executive job with a mid-tier tyre manufacturer, where he met his about-to-relapse recovering alcoholic wife in the typing pool, and is trying to suppress his suicidal ideation by getting a scooter.
