What the Klon Centaur actually does (and doesn't do).
After twenty years of $5,000 listings and Discord theology, the pedal itself is almost a relief.
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 owned a gold non-horsie from 2007 to 2019. I sold it for a stupid amount of money to a dentist in Munich. I bought a KTR a year later because I missed the sound and not the anxiety of owning the sound. So I have spent about nineteen years with this circuit in some form on my board, and I would like to tell you what it does, what it doesn't do, and why the conversation around it is mostly about the wrong things.
The Klon is a clean boost with a dirt option bolted on. That is the whole pitch. Bill Finnegan built a pedal that lets you push a tube amp into its own breakup without coloring the front end the way a Tube Screamer does. The Tube Screamer scoops your bass and humps the mids around 720 Hz. That is a feature when you are playing a Strat into a Fender clean and you need cut. It is not the Klon's job. The Klon is closer to flat. Closer.
What people get wrong is that they think it sounds 'transparent.' It does not. Mira (mira.alves) said it well in a thread last spring: 'The Klon is honest about its bass. It is dishonest about its top end.' She is right. There is a treble lift that arrives somewhere around 3 kHz that makes a single-coil Strat sit forward in a mix in a way a clean boost shouldn't. That lift is most of the magic. The rest is the diode-clipping section running in parallel with a clean path, which is the trick the clones spent a decade reverse-engineering and then telling you was the secret.
Here is the part nobody wants to hear. A Soul Food gets you 85% of the way there for $80. A KTR gets you to 99%. A real Centaur gets you to 100% and a wood-paneled basement full of resentment. If you are gigging, buy the KTR or any of the modern J Rockett Archers and stop reading forum posts. If you are recording at a studio that already has one, use it and don't ask the engineer how much it cost. If you are buying a Centaur in 2026 for $5,500, you are not buying a pedal. You are buying a story, and the story is no longer interesting.
'The Klon is honest about its bass. It is dishonest about its top end.' That is the whole review.
— Johnny
The story was never the distraction from the pedal. The story was the product, and demystifying it while recommending the $329 sibling keeps the priesthood open under new management.
The essay's closing line, the story is no longer interesting, is exactly wrong. The circuit was never interesting. A clean-ish boost with a parallel clipping path is a Tuesday at any decent bench, which is why the clones arrived within a decade and why the essay can honestly say a Soul Food covers 85 percent for eighty dollars. What made the Centaur a five-figure object was the story: the waiting list, the gold horse, the secrecy epoxy, Finnegan's stubbornness. Scarcity narrative is the only component in that box you cannot order from Mouser, and the essay spends two thousand words dismantling the mythology before conceding that the mythology is the entire price.
And notice what the demystification actually recommends: the KTR, at three hundred twenty-nine dollars, for the last one percent. If the conversation is mostly about the wrong things, then the right conclusion is the Soul Food and a closed wallet. Instead the priesthood survives with a new tithe. Ninety-nine percent for eighty dollars, one hundred percent for four times that, and a working guitarist is told the last point is worth two hundred fifty dollars by the same essay that calls the market deranged. The math of mystique is intact. Only the address changed.
The dentist in Munich also deserves a fairer reading than the essay's smirk. He did not overpay for a boost. He bought a piece of design history at the market's price for design history, the same transaction as a first-pressing record or a pre-CBS Strat, categories this magazine treats with respect. Scarcity value is value. The essay knows this, because it held the asset for twelve years and sold at the top.
Buy the klone, skip the sermon. The Centaur conversation was always a story about stories, and a magazine is the last building that should pretend stories are worthless.
Discussion
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