Behringer Chorus Symphony

I'll start by saying that I sent this back the same day as I got it. Sounded ok. Pre-amp was warm. Chorus was fine. The hole on the back for a PSU jack was too small for the cables I had so I had to find a jack with a tapered form in order to make a connection. Tha'ts probably what made me send it back in the end. Have ordered a Warm Audio WA-C1 instead. I like other stuff I have by them so don't doubt it'll be anything short of great.

I want to preface my review by saying that I'm definitely NOT a Behri hater - just the opposite, I own several of their products and I love all of them, wether it's my Pro-800 or any of my Behri guitar pedals. I stand by their philosophy of giving people good clones without paying exorbitant prices for a brand logo, which hides the same ancient tech from the '70 or '80.

But this one - I have to say I'm extremally disappointed, angry even. This product is piece of...

I am a big fan of Jazz Chorus, I grew up listening to King Crimson's trilogy from the '80 and fell in love with the sound of piercing cleans with legendary chorus. So, naturally, I fell for Chorus Symphony marketing like crazy, with promo showing JC120 in the background and playing mostly clean chorusy stuff. Finally, I can have at least a part of it, without breaking a bank for even basic JC-22 reissue.
In their promo they said that this is THE chorus from JC (ergo, from CE-1) and THE PREAMP from JC. That may be true, electrically, but it is definitely NOT the crystal clean sound without break-up you expect from JC... But I'll come back to that.

First - pros.
Pedal is extremally sturdy and gives me confidence. Fully metal, nice knob and switches, great color scheme and it is big, like VERY big, which I personally love. That would be all. The option to switch between buffered+preamp or true bypas is great.

Now cons.
Preamp. A big, big lie by Behri. As I said, I don't know electronics, but I don't care - when you sell a product to a musician, you have to talk with him/her with musical terms in mind, not electrical. This preamp doesn't work or sound like JC at all! That's because, musically, this preamp works and sounds like preamp from CE-1, in theory of course - completely different characteristic. It breaks up extremally fast, which would make Frusciante fans happy, but as I said - it was marketed as JC preamp, JC being the king of cleans. I've never heard a real CE-1 preamp, but even in the demos I can hear, that the original doesn't have Behri's problems.
Which would be, apart from breaking up too soon - the preamp sucks treble out. No matter how much treble I push before Chorus Symphony trying to compensate - sound going out is muddy as hell. To get decently clean sound I need to boost treble post pedal like crazy.
And now, an absolute dealbreaker - extreme volume drop. This pedal is completely unusable in a pedalboard unless you use it always-on, but even then it completely disrupts gain structure. I read somewhere, that it was true even with the original (CE-1) to some extent and people got around it by putting a buffered pedal in front of it - I did so, but it didn't help. Neither did plugging it in mono. Believe me - volume drop is ENORMOUS. No, it's not just phasing that naturally cancels some frequencies out - it's volume drop at output.

You could get around it by increasing the power in the preamp, but then we get to point one - sure, it'll get louder, but you'll get that overdrive that I don't want.

As for the sound of the chorus - I have the UC200 and I truly like its sound miles better. It' not great at all, but it is still more bright and volume drop is not even close to Chorus Symphony's one.

What I don't understand is why Behri didn't try to improve it - even if the original had similar problems (which it didn't to that extent, judging from research online), Behri could tweak some things. They have a good reputation to givin some modern twists to old designs.

Overall, this chorus absolutely sucks. Muddy, low output, distorts to soon, messes up with a pedalboard gain structure and even its beauty won't help. If you're like me and you were looking for That JC Sound - DON'T BUY THIS PEDAL. My TC Electronic Deluxe Combo with almost any chorus, wether it's from Zoom or anything in Guitar Rig gives waaaaay better sound. Pedal will be returned.

Have to say, it seemed like a weird one at first - especially with how the gain/leveling works, but I have now been able to compare it with an original CE-1 and is very close.

First of all: it comes with the internal switch set to "true bypass" so the preamp is completely disabled when you disable the effect pedal. You need to this to "buffered" for the pedal to behave exactly like the original CE-1 and keep the preamp active at all times. This should help with tackling level differences as well when engaging/disengaging the effect.

I have compared to the original with guitar + synths. On the original, the vibrato effect can be turned up to be a bit more extreme, but this could just be because off high tolerance in component/control values. The chorus sounds very similar! The preamp sounds very similar between both when moderately pushed. The original, when turned up all the way, actually broke up the sound in a not so pleasant way (with some nasty low frequency distortion). The Behringer didn't do this, it sounded more compressed over the full frequency spectrum. So while the preamp didn't react exactly the same, actually the Behringer preamp seemed a bit more useable over the whole level range. Maybe this particular CE-1 needed servicing as I believe it was still 100% original.

For synths and other line-level sources, both the Behringer and original are not ideal because even at "low" sensitivity, the preamp will distort pretty quickly. So if you want to maintain a clean signal, without any distortion, the output level will be pretty low.

When connected to my interface, I actually got quite a bit of noise with the original CE-1 (probably a ground loop). This was not an issue with the Behringer.