Valeton GP-5

This is the MVP of this year but no one seems aware of the potential of it yet.
Listen, either you don't have the budget for bigger units or you like cheap and good stuff. For both, you're in the correct spot.
Are you aware of this thing can play NAM profiles for 80 euros?
Do you know what it means?
It means you're not only getting a bluetooth pedal with amp models, you're buying the freakin player. The world is yours now, go crazy, go find every expensive unit's neural model and play it for free.
Get a 30€ wireless midi footswitch, the chococolate one and you have a 5 switch unit and the best part is, this pedal can be powered by the footswitch and if you throw a small powerbank to the chocolate footswitch, it can also power the valeton as well and voila...You have a wireless/powerless setup. Go further and buy the harley benton wireless guitar jack and a small expression pedal and for 200€ you have an endless options / wireless / power cord free / versatile as f. setup.
tonex my.....ss.

OK, I hadn't paid much attention to this pedal because I'm a dinosaur who doesn't know what neural modelling or IR loading is. Then I saw the Glenn Fricker review and was impressed. So I scrounged together not so many dollars and bought it.

OMG girlfriend! Straight out of the box using only the Valeton app and the pre-loaded patches, and I have a complete guitar rig of amps, cabs and pedals. In fact many guitar rigs, I would even say I have a plethora of guitar rigs, if I knew what a plethora was.

If there is a problem with the GP5 it lies in the extremely small form factor. I've got to invest another fistful of dollars for a midi controller to expand the functionality of the unit. I think I want a FRFR amp to maximise the sonic properties of the pedal. Well, I've never had a problem spending money on guitars and accessories in the past so I'm certain I'll overcome those two slight issues.

My conclusion: if you haven't already bought this pedal your life is worthless. Your children will not respect you; your wife will have an affair; and your cat will defecate on your favourite shirt. Your community will shun you and no house of worship will offer you shelter. You must rehabilitate yourself before it is too late for your own sake, I'm begging you.

Good news first: The ability to load IRs is cool. The main reason I bought this was to use an acoustic guitar IR to spice up the piezo in my PRS, and this worked! Just upload an IR with the app, add some EQ and compressor, and there you go with a usable acoustic sound.

I also liked how the footswitch can be configured to cycle between a set of presets ("songlist mode"). This allows me to cycle between the IR for the piezo, and a clean and a crunch sound for the magnetic pickups. Really nice, and other brands selling tiny modeling pedals should pay a close look here.

I also really liked the effects (but I may not be experienced enough to judge them since normally I play quite dry, with a tiny bit of reverb at most).

And the build quality is really excellent. Unbelievable at this price point, almost!

BUT...

... the first thing I noticed after plugging it in was the huge latency. It is also there in bypass, with all components disabled. It is there on both the analog and digital out. It feels almost like a slap-back delay. It's definitely longer than the 6ms or so that are advertised. It's a lot more latency even compared with my modeling amp from the 2000's I have been playing for decades now. I find that quite irritating.

In direct comparison with some plugins on my PC I also found that the pedal is lacking dynamics. All amps sound quite compressed, even the clean ones, even when everything else in the chain (except the cab) is disabled.

Further, most amp models sound harsh to me. In theory, I can EQ stuff out using the app, besides a ton of other adjustments. But after playing around with it a little I found that quite cumbersome.

Taken together: It's not for me. Great features, but the sound... not so much my taste. What a pity, since I was quite hyped about this pedal after watching all those overenthusiastic youtube videos.

I'm a singer/rhythm guitarist in a punk band, so to be honest this pedal is overkill for my needs, but I had a bit of spare money and wanted to see if this lives up to the hype. It does.

Positives: So many sounds in one tiny box, access to any number of amps, cabs and pedals. Basic sounds are pretty good and with a little tweaking can be highly personalised. The case feels very solid - the pedal is heavier than you expect. The delays and reverbs are very nice.

Negatives: The writing on the screen is a little difficult to see. The app, while intuitive, is not terribly easy to use (the sliders go all over the place) and I've had some problems with Bluetooth connection to my iPad, although not to my iPhone. Also, I really bought this pedal to add effects like chorus, reverb and delay - I already have the overdrive sounds I want from my Blues Driver - but I find the chorus on here to be a little weak and one dimensional. And of course, you only have the one switch, although that isn't actually a problem for me as I'm only going to be using two or three patches and can cycle between them.

That said, I've already set up a simple Marshall JCM800 patch and another one which emulates a Vox AC30, and both sound very, very good. Just for that, this pedal is worth the money. It won't be replacing my BD-2, but it is already sitting next to it on my pedalboard and I can't see it coming off for a long time.