Eventide H9 vs. Strymon Volante: a comparison ten years too late.
I bought the H9 in 2014 and the Volante in 2018. Here is what I actually use them for in 2026.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
I bought the Eventide H9 in 2014. I bought it because Andy Othling kept posting videos of textural shimmer pads on Instagram and I was twenty-eight and impressionable. I bought the Strymon Volante in 2018, four years after Strymon shipped it, because by then everyone had stopped talking about it and the resale price had come down. Both pedals are still on my board. They do different things now than they did when I bought them.
The H9 is the more capable pedal on paper. It has every Eventide algorithm — the H910/H949 pitch shifters, the Crystals shimmer-pitch reverb, the ModEchoVerb, the Blackhole, the Pitchfuzz that nobody talks about and that is one of the most original sounds ever shipped in a stompbox. The pedal itself is two presets per algorithm, MIDI-controllable, expression-controllable, and ugly. The interface is genuinely hostile. You will not edit a patch on the pedal. You will edit it on the H9 Control app, which has not been meaningfully updated in years and which crashes on iPad about once an hour.
The Volante is the opposite. It is a tape echo and pseudo-spring reverb that does one and a half things well and almost nothing else. You can program a head pattern, you can set the wear and the wow and flutter, you can pan the heads in stereo. That is the whole pedal. The interface is excellent. The knobs feel good. The pedal looks like a piece of pro audio equipment, not a toy.
Here is what I actually use them for in 2026. The H9 sits at the end of my chain and does one thing: Crystals shimmer reverb on a single preset I made in 2016 and have never touched. That is it. I have not used another algorithm in two years. The Volante is on all the time, set to a three-head pattern with the wear all the way up and the spring reverb at about 30%. It is doing what an Echoplex used to do on every record from 1968 to 1975 — adding a low-level slap and a tape-like ambient halo that you don't hear until you turn it off.
What does this mean for you? If you are buying one of these two pedals in 2026, the question is what you want it to do. If you want a Swiss Army knife of weird sounds and you are willing to put up with the app, buy the H9 Max used for $400 to $500. If you want one specific sound — tape echo plus low-key ambient — buy the Volante new for $530 or used for $400. Do not buy both. The overlap is small and the cost of board space is high. Aris (aris.kemp) plays an acoustic D-28 in DADGAD into a Volante and nothing else, and the result is one of the most evocative live setups I have ever heard. He does not own an H9. He does not need one.
'The H9 sits at the end of my chain and does one thing. I have not used another algorithm in two years.'
— Johnny
One preset since 2016 is not an indictment the essay dodges, it is the endgame of every deep pedal, and the H9 complaints are a decade stale in a world where the H90 ships.
Read the actual usage data the essay reports about itself. The H9: one Crystals preset, untouched since 2016, still on the board, still on records. The Volante: one three-head setting, wear up, spring at thirty percent, on all the time. Both pedals converged to a single beloved sound. The essay frames the Volante's convergence as maturity, doing what an Echoplex did on every record from 1968 to 1975, and the H9's as decline, I have not used another algorithm in two years. Same behavior, opposite verdicts, and the difference is entirely which pedal's single sound the author currently finds romantic. Tape flutter is heritage; shimmer is apparently a phase. The pedals did the same job.
The interface prosecution is also litigating a settled case. Yes, the H9's onboard editing is hostile and the app aged badly. Eventide shipped the H90 with a screen, dual algorithms, and a modern editor, which is the company agreeing with the criticism and fixing it. A 2026 comparison that spends its energy on a 2014 interface while the successor sits at retail is reviewing a discontinued grievance. The used H9 the essay's framing would scare readers off of is, at current prices, the single deepest per-dollar effects purchase in the industry, one preset at a time.
There is also a buried lede the essay steps over: it bought the H9 because of Instagram shimmer videos at twenty-eight and impressionable, and the Volante only after the hype cooled and the price dropped. That is not a footnote. That is the entire mechanism this magazine documents elsewhere, hype-cycle purchasing versus post-cycle value buying, demonstrated twice by its own author, and the essay had the receipts in hand and declined to run its own audit.
Two boxes, two single sounds, both earning their board space for a decade. The honest headline was Deep Pedals All End This Way, and it would have been a better essay than the scorecard.
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