i was about to leave the sale but decided to take one more close look in the same box in case i overlooked anything. sure enough, i could see (just barely) an orange box at the very bottom buried underneath a bunch of the aforementioned cables. upon seeing part of the picture i thought it was the box for the RP50 and figured i'd take it, so i pulled it out. in fact, it was an RP80 (pretty much the same as the 50, but with an expression pedal), but this one was almost new and it was complete in the box with power supply. i headed back over to the seller and asked his price. after looking it over a moment, he said he wanted 10 dollars. i tried to chip him down a bit, but he wasn't having it, so i caved and handed over the cash. all told it was 11 bucks for the pair.
on to the pedals: both work perfectly. on the RP50, the internal switches work fine, but the actual "buttons" that you press are damaged beyond repair. why? because some genius at Digitech decided to make this thing about as cheap as they possibly could: the buttons are actually part of the case. that's right, they're designed to be cut almost completely off of the case, but they're "hangin' on by a thread" so that they have some give when you push them. once they're flexed or pushed too hard they break free from the rest of the plastic casing and you're left with a nasty hole. delightful. still, this was more likely a case of the previous owner trying to push the buttons with their feet, but even so, what a complete and utter cop-out on behalf of the design team!
on the upside, the nicer of the two, the RP80, is completely intact and is in great shape. aside from the expression pedal, i believe they are identical sound-wise. they seem to share all of the same effects and functions. neither have stereo ins, but the RP80 has stereo outs, which is pretty cool. some of the distortions on this thing are great -- some are thin and thrashy while others are really heavy and crunchy. i like the phasers and flangers too. i tried them out with my guitar as well as a couple of my synths. the phaser sounds especially good on synth, and the distortions worked better than i expected on some drums. there's even a neat little "talking synth" effect that sounds a lot like the Formant synth on the EMX-1; sort of a "yeeawwww yeeeeawwwww" sound.
if anyone has their eye on one of these, just be sure you're ginger with the thing 'cause they are not built to last as actual stomp boxes. as a desktop unit, they'll fair much better. and if you can find 'em cheap, i say go for it. they pack a lot of okay sounds into a small unit, and both can use batteries (albeit you have to use 6 AAs!!).
oh yeah, one more thing: i don't think the PSU is original, as it's a Danelectro "Zero Hum" AC-DC adapter. if you read my post last weekend about the Boss HC-2, you might see where this was going: "Zero Hum, eh? i'll just see about that!"... it's true. this power supply is pretty close to the specs of Boss' PSA120, and works with my HC-2, DS-1 and MT-2 perfectly, with no hum. just thought i'd throw this out there for anyone who might find it useful or at least interesting. i did.
