I've tried several and none unseated my big box vintage RAT, until the Dunwich Volt Thrower. That was a big deal to me, because the RAT is really awkward on my board and usually requires some kind of clean blend to be really useful (though not always, depending on the tone and context). The best runner up was the Fuzzrocious Rat Tail, but the one I had was giving me this subtle hollow mids sound almost like a cocked wah tone. It probably wouldn't have made a big difference in a mix (in fact the band I was in at the time loved the tone in the mix), but it bothered me and it didn't have a clear enough tonal advantage over my RAT with a LS-2 for a slight clean blend to justify keeping it.
The Dunwich has better low end retention in general than all of the modded copies I've played previously and lots of clipping options, without fundamentally altering the identifiable "RAT tone". Though you can push it harder in different ways than a traditional RAT and explore its own capabilities too. A lot of modded copies I tried felt like they lost something in the modding process to retain more low end that made it stick out as a RAT in the first place, got too "soft" and didn't have that hard biting edge I like. I think it helps that the Volt Thrower has internal trim pots for gain and "sub" frequencies feeding the clipping stages as well, so you can fine tune it a bit. I did that with mine, dialed it in perfectly to my taste for a P bass in BEAD tuning. The two band EQ helps tremendously as well, but I haven't done anything extreme with mine.
Here's the demo clips I made with the Volt Thrower in the Dunwich Tourbox. I haven't made any with the production version I bought, but maybe I'll do some comparisons with my big box RAT in the near future. It's true they're not in regular production, Dunwich does batches with preorders typically. In my opinion they're worth the wait and the price, when compared to other similar high end boutique pedals. I make no secret that I'm a big fan of Nick's work though, his design abilities go a lot farther than just changing the value on a capacitor here and there and throwing in a couple mods.
Settings and signal chain are noted in the descriptions, I tried to run through extremely varied tones.
Fingerstyle:
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Picking:
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Low Gain: (second clip, first is the prototype "Ol Dirty Bass" pedal)
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