Hello! Long time guitar player, fairly new to the pedal game.

Do any death by audio pedals sound good? I'm not sure if I'm buying someone else's broken used shit or if DBA stuff is just harsh and unpleasant by design.

I've bought two on ebay now. The Evil Filter and the Robot.

The fuzz section of the Evil Filter sounds REALLY HARSH. Not in a good fuzzy way, but in an I-think-the-previous-owner-must-have-plugged-a-300-watt-amp-into-the-input kinda way. It hurts my ears and it sounds broken. The only setting that doesn't sound unpleasant is if I put the fuzz output on like 2 1/2 and my guitar volume no more than about halfway on. Anything more than that is all harsh nonsense. The square waveform toggle is completely useless. Just noise at what seems like ~5x the volume of the other waveform. I've nearly gone deaf/blown up my amp several times testing it out. The filter section works fine, however.

The Robot pedal I just bought has lots of background noise when you're not even doing anything. The arp setting doesn't let more than about 1% of the guitar tone come through, it's primarily just harsh auto-arp noise. I'm not exaggerating, it's really difficult to hear any root notes through the arp as it's mostly a noise arp.

I've tried em both through the effect loop and in front of the amp. Using passive single coils at the neck and through my passive bridge humbuckers. Both pedals seem to sound better through single coils at very low volume only. Going through humbuckers is pretty much useless with these pedals.

Am I just unlucky or are these things REALLY hard to dial in usable sounds out of?