Strymon El Capistan - on paper it's the perfect analog delay for me with how warm, ambient, and out-of-the-way it can get. But when you use it with high gain, you can really hear that there's some kind of weird tape saturation filter (that's not as apparent with lower gain tones) that you can't dial out, no matter how you set the Bias. Basically the pedal put a very strange sounding, distracting layer of hissy saturation over the repeats that just did something to the sound I couldn't deal with. Sucks, I really wanted to like it. The treble filtering and modulation was basically perfect but that tape saturation effect was just too pronounced and exaggerated, and it killed the pedal for me.
Strymon DIG - again, on paper it's the perfect digital delay, and I really thought it would succeed where the El Cap had failed for me, but the Tone control DOES NOT IMPACT THE FIRST REPEAT. I realize that this sounds so stupid that some of you might think I am mistaken, but no. The first repeat is just as pristine. and therefore just as demanding of your attention, as the dry signal. So, because you can't darken the first repeat, so there's no real way to move it out of the way of your playing and into the background other than turning down the Mix so low that the delay it's basically off. Strymon placing the Tone control where they did in the circuit was just so dumb, especially considering all the'd need to to is slightly rearrange the way the Tone works in the circuit that would have allowed the "compounding Tone knob effect with each repeat" to happen while ALSO influencing the first repeat. This really was a truly disappointing pedal for me, because otherwise it basically did everything I ever wanted out of any delay. But nope, the Tone control thing took the whole pedal off the table for me.
