Lehle Mono Volume S

i've been using the original Lehle Volume pedal for years, the one as big and heavy and solid as the old Benz /8, and i'm still using it – but.

at home, where i keep a small pedalboard on the floor under the desk, the original one doesn't fit... so i counted up to 20, trying to resist throwing some further money to another piece of gear – and finally surrendered to buying this.

it does all that the big one does, and better – because.
level setting, on this one, is quantized: you press once, twice (three times a lady) – and your level is perfectly "reproduced" like last time you used it.

why this matters?

because you have to get back to "old" recordings (that track, that signal chain, that guitar), and make an edit on the fly, one that shall fit like it was done exactly on that day, on that time, in that take, on that session – so level must match first and foremost, of all things!

level on its big brother is a potentiometer – smooth, great looking, protected against accidental misuse, but still a pot that you can easily place 5 or 2 or 4 degrees away from where it was meant to be (unless min or max, of course)... this pre-set push-button setting is simply bullet-proof, instead: always at that same exact level.

feel-wise and sound-wise, this Mono Volume S works exactly like the standard Lehle Volume Pedal: the one after which all other volume pedals i have can only be dusted from time to time – it's just size-wise smaller (which helps, in my case).

ps: beside its use for setting volume or making swells, the bit that hardly anyone notices is that, from its output onward, your signal runs to destination "caged" in a solid, protected path, impedance-wise... dead-silent, impervious to stray magnetic fields and RF interferences – and (even better): your guitar's tone and volume pots now scale your signal perfectly smooth, without sudden peaks or dips, across their entire rotation, too, because its active circuitry doesn't load your passive controls [and, if you have guitars or basses with active circuitry, too, like i for myself have: it works its magic with them just the same]!

I use it on electric guitar, and the sound quality is great. The «taper» feels natural from the factory. I have tested many different volume pedals, and this is not the case on most of them. I know you can adjust it via software, but haven’t felt the need for doing that yet. Have also not tested the usb expression pedal feature. The build quality seems solid, and the design looks nice.

The jacks is a bit tightly spaced, and the power supply input obstructs an angled «vol» output jack from being used «the right way». The same is true for the input jack if using usb. I ended up using a longer cable, and turning the «vol» output jack the other way around for now (EBS PCF-PG cables). And you can not use 3 angled jacks if you need to use both the «dir» and «vol» output. Otherwise some of them would hit your foot. Maybe it would work better on a pedalboard that allows the cables to run from underneath. I can see why they placed the connectors the way they did, but maybe it would be better to have the power and usb jacks in the middle?

A picture on Thomann shows 100mA current draw, so I was a little surprised when my pedal tells me 150mA. Don’t know if they changed anything?

It is a little expensive, but you get a quality device.