A vintage distortion, ranging from a gentle blues sustain to more hard-edged fuzz tones.
This plugins sounds amazing! But the output level is really low when the ‘drive’ is set left of middle. Even when ‘level’ is set to max the volume is still lower than direct signal. Would buy it for sure when output level can be set higher (like a volume). Really hope OverToneDSP will ‘fix’ this!
I’d bet it’s for headroom (digital and sonic headroom). As I understand it, in order to fit all that harmonic information–which I can clearly hear and this is what distinguishes it from the other distortions–the overall amplitude is perceptively less. Otherwise, some dominant harmonic characteristic would saturate the channel and it wouldn’t sound as rich.
Does this make sense?
Btw, to me it sounds great!
The drive control goes from unity gain at minimum to around 40dB at maximum. Similarly the output level control goes from -Inf (min) to unity gain (max). This is typical of many analogue distortion / overdrive effects, and allows you to set the amount of drive, and then optionally trim the output to match the level when bypassed.