Catalinbread Karma Suture, new superior Harmonic Percolator copy

     First of all, the silk-screened box, custom pick and free sticker were really nice.   I've never bought a pedal that came in a static shielded bag before-- nice.   Secondly, the graphics on the Karma Suture are really nice and the white vintage-style knobs are cool too.
     After I did the review of the Chuck Collins version of the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, I ended up selling it.   The pedal was noisy and had a subdued high end on all of it's settings that started to bug me after a while, and it ended up on Craigslist.  Although it's authentic to the original, the enclosure was flimsy and the components, although NOS, were not the highest quality.   The enclosure was held together with huge wood screws and one of the holes stripped.   It looked home-made, which it was, mostly due to it's lack of lettering or other graphics.
     A few months later, the folks at Catalinbread introduced the Karma Suture.  This is a boutique pedal, with NOS and newer components of the highest quality.   Right off the bat, it solved both the noise issue and the subdued high end.   Plus, at it's highest settings, it never gets nasal, like the Collins version.   It's got the standard output (volume) and input (gain), plus two extra knobs: one for diodes and one for density.
     The diodes knobs goes from more open and uncompressed with less clipping, less high end and more volume to a more saturated, compressed sound with more high end and less volume., Between the two extremes ther's a wide variety of tonal shades, which you can fine tune to your liking.   The output knob can be used to compensate for the differences in volume.
     The density knob controls the amount of low end fed into the input and goes from a thinner, cutting brighter tone all the way counter-clockwise to a fatter, slightly more saturated sound all the way clockwise.    With the knob at noon, it offers the most balanced tone.   The tone is a little cleaner with the knob all the way down and a little more saturated with the knob all the way up.
     With the two extra knobs, the pedal offers a substantially wider range of usable sounds than the Collins version, with more fidelity and less of the Collins pedals unwanted noise.   The enhanced even order harmonics are still there, with useable tone on all the different settings of the density and diodes knobs.    The pedal is touch responsive and dynamic, with excellent note clarity, even with complex chords.   The even order harmonics the pedal churns out keep all the notes clear and distinct.
     This is probably the best Harmonic Percolator type pedal out there.   I haven't seen or actually tried out of them (obviously), but of the two I've tried, the Karma Suture is definitely the better sounding and more versatile of the two.   Plus, it's substantially cheaper than the current price for a new Chuck Collins Harmonic Percolator.