Klon Centaur (the meme episode)
Where to start when talking about the Klon Centaur? You know, the one that fetches literally dozens of hundreds of dollars on the Ebay?
Me when I found out much used Klons are selling for.
Whelp, I wanted to find out what all the hype was about, without having to sell my car to do so. I ordered a couple Klone PCBs from Aaron at solderedsound.com (Great guy to deal with and sells very high quality pedals).
Pretty much the exact E-mail I sent to Solderedsound.com
So anyways, the PCBs are of superb quality and his instructions are very clear. With this board I could choose to use a buffered bypass or a true-bypass switching setup. I’ll save the differences between the two for another day, but part of the Klon’s reputation is based on it’s glorious buffer, so I decided to go that route.
Using PCB-mounted pots and skipping the battery jack installation this build didn’t take too long to build at all. The PCB sits at an angle in the enclosure so the electros don’t prevent the base from being secured properly.
For a sometimes over-hyped pedal I have to say I’m impressed with it’s sound. I really like it with the gain low at around 10 o’clock and the treble control just past noon. It really compliments my setup and my other overdrive pedal (a LP Eternity clone). It’s very transparent and doesn’t really take over the sound of my amp, but boosts it juuuuust right.
No centaurs here.
So do I think the original Klon Centaur is worth the price? Tough call. I don’t think I could ever justify spending several hundred dollars on a pedal, let alone thousands. It’s a great pedal and it’ll part of my rig for a while (great for those Wilco cover tunes) so it might be worth it for some, but for people like me I’m more than happy with a clone. Here’s something that I think sums up the Klon rather nicely.
Woody Laboratories 
Thank you a lot.
Bestest regards: Max