Opinions on Elysia 500 series gear

There’s a lot used because they’ve sold a lot of gear at a good price point. Also, they’ve issued an updated version of the Xpressor, so folks are selling the old one.

I owned the OG Xpressor, and it is a really powerful compressor. No box tone, but capable of crazy compression effects. Great on drums, bass, good on everything else.

I liked the Karacter, but found it to be sort of limited in terms of usability. When it worked for a part it was great.

Nvelope is fantastic, but I’m not convinced it is that much better than plugins, and for me it was a little tweaky for tracking.

Never used the EQ or 500 MPressor. MPressor seems cool but unlinkable, so not so cool for drums.

I had the the Skulptor cube build quality top notch at least the unit I had, but the sound just wasn't there for me. I sent it back because I was getting the same quality from my RME UCX II pre's and Totalmix Eq.
Though I have been eyeing their 500 series Filter EQ

That description of the Xpressor above is very much like my experience of the humble Aphex 651, FWIW. And they're still affordable

I picked up Nvelope and Karacter recently and also noticed that they're on sale.

It took me a second to figure out how to get Nvelope to work properly and I think it really only shines in dual band mode. At first I wanted to make it work in full and just as a lazy "let's expand the tail" but it really works best when you use the expanded feature set.

With both of these units I love that they operate in dual mono or stereo modes with the same feature sets. It makes them great bang for the buck when you look at them on sale today for $800 or so. Nvelope, for example, also includes a shelving EQ function, I see 500 series tilt EQ's going for $300 or $400. With Nvelope you get very, very usable features beyond that for $400/channel.

Karacter is awesome in my opinion. Utterly convincing saturation. I get very nervous about extreme saturation in digital realm for reasons that I think are obvious, you can get a wide variety of convincing tones out of this thing and the dials work basically like a guitar amp but with a wet/dry knob. Love it.

Also Karacter sounds great on electric organ VI's.

Last comment. The build quality on these is very impressive. On the level of the RND 500 stuff in terms of solid feel. EXCEPT, Elysia has big easy to use knobs and really takes advantage of every inch of 500 real estate and never feels crowded.

don't a lot of guitar amps have switchable diode and tube rectifiers? aka slew rate limiters