Warm Audio broke into the pedal market a few years ago using the same strategy that made them a successful pro-audio brand: by producing high-quality and budget-friendly recreations of beloved but often cost-prohibitive vintage gear.
WA's line of vintage-style effects is currently made up of four pedals—the Jet Phaser, Foxy Tone Box, Warmdrive, and Centavo—and today, Andy is going to play through all of them to see if their sound is as rich as their sub-$200 prices are affordable.
The Warm Audio Jet Phaser is inspired by Roland's legendary AP-7 Jet Phaser, produced in Japan in the mid-1970s. Like the original, it combines a grizzly fuzz circuit with a phase-shifting effect on the other side.
There are six selectable modes that allow players to play the phase circuit alone or with the jet distortion mixed in. The Jet Phaser features a fast/slow footswitch for gradual speed-ramping between a set fast rate or a slow rate that's adjustable using the complementary knob control. There are addition controls for jet level, which can give you an extra lead boost, and resonance for applying feedback to any phaser mode.
The Foxy Tone Box is a faithful recreation of the legendary Foxx Tone Machine circuit, produced from 1971 to '78 and made famous by artists like Peter Frampton, Billy Gibbons, Beck, Nine Inch Nails, and many others.
While the Foxy Tone Box certainly looks like its inspiration—with its control knobs on the side, brand badge on the top, and velvet-covered enclosure—the internals are just as impressive. It features carbon resistors, germanium 1N34A diodes, and premium film capacitors, as well as the NOS 2N3565 Fairchild transistors that were also used in the original circuit.
One of the more recent releases, the Warm Audio Warmdrive is based on the Hermida Audio Zendrive, which itself was designed as a pedal-based recreation of the legendary (and legendarily expensive) Dumble Overdrive Special. Today, the Zendrive regularly sells in the $600 range on the used market, while the new Warmdrive goes for just $149 brand-new.
This amp-in-a-box effect also promises the same flexibility of the original circuit, giving players the kind of deeply coveted, saturated overdrive that's become a studio staple. And as with the other pedals in the line, its built with premium components that likewise match the pedal it's based on.
Last but not certainly not least, the Centavo is based on one of the most highly coveted pedals in all of effects history: the ever-iconic Klon Centaur. Since the original Centaur was released in the 1990s, several pedal brands have sought to recreate the mythologized circuit, which now sells in a range of anywhere from $4,500 on the low end up to $8,000.
From Warm Audio, the Centavo promises to be both accurate in tone and easy on your wallet at just $179 new. It's built with TL072 op amps, vintage-style germanium diodes, and features a charge pump that converts its nine volts to 18, which together provide the headroom, boost, and hard-clipped overdrive the original is known for. New to the Centavo is its MOD switch on the back panel, which shifts the treble range to a lower point to thicken up your signal's low-end.