Mooer Pure Octave

I ordered an octave effect because I thought it could round out my sound; I do a solo performance thing with a loop pedal, and I thought I could add some bass.
Feeling adventurous, I ordered the Mooer exactly because no one had rated it yet.

Out of the box, it's a sturdy, good-looking piece of metal. The three black knobs seem a tad flimsy and and hard to read, also you might have difficulty twisting them if you have fat fingers like my friend Stephan does. But so far, so good.

As for the performance, there is a slight latency when turned completely wet. Also, the pitches didn't sound to me like pure octaves: they where distinctly detuned octaves. There is also a noticeable drop in sound volume. I was mostly surprised by the detuning because I'd listened to a few demos on YouTube and there it sounded much better. My fat-fingered friend Stephan was of the opinion that how this pedal performed was par for the octaver-pedal-course, so it is possible that my criticism is unjustifiably based on unrealistic expectations.

I could find a use in my act for this pedal because I do make some weird jive too, but it's not really what I had expected.

I'm still on the fence. I've only gigged out with it once and so I hope to find more time to try it out before the thirty days are up so I can decide whether to keep it or send it back, and whether at all to try a different octave pedal.

It may be true that the build quality seems surprisingly good for such an inexpensive box, but that can't possibly compensate for this sound.

To be frank whatever algorithm is used for the pitch shifting in this pedal has to be rewritten. As others have noted, the added octaves sound out-of-tune most of the time. Even on those notes where it didn't sound out of tune, there's a very noticeable fluttering effect, probably due to the windowing used for the pitch detection.

Another reviewer commented that maybe that's standard fare for octave pedals. Let me just say, I've never heard this particular problem before, in analog or digital pedals, nor in any software. This is easily the worst-sounding octaver I've heard anywhere.

I've tried a few Mooer effects in the past, and they've all sounded above-average or at least acceptable for the price range. But not this one I'm afraid. Back to the drawing board. Will return the one I ordered for sure.