Hello. I’m new to the forum and to EHX products.

On Monday I got a Pog2 that I had phone ordered from a company in Brooklyn called ProAudioStar, for $280. The unit arrived in less than pristine condition. The paint job is poor quality, with at least 3 dozen tiny specks of dust in the paint, and the white paint has the kind of orange peel texture you get from an amateur spray painting. The specks are mostly in the white with the majority on the bottom of the unit, but there are some minor flaws in the red also. The 4 screws in the bottom look odd too. A couple of them appear to be not perfectly round, and they all have irregular notches in the outside edge of the heads. The indentation that is shaped for a phillips screwdriver looks a little distorted, like someone had used a too small screwdriver and it slipped in the soft metal. The screws look like they were made from pot metal. I have seen a lot of screws in my job doing maintainence work but never any that looked as cheap as these.

Question 1: Do EHX boxes normally have rough finishes and low quality screws, or is mine unusual? This is my first EHX purchase so I can’t compare it to other EHX products, but the finish on an inexpensive Digitech multi-effects case is a flawless finish that was obviously factory applied, because it is not something one could get from a spray can. On the other hand the finish on the Pog looks like it came straight out of a can of Rustoleum and was left to dry on a dirty table in a dusty room.

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The unit that I received had apparently seen much handling. In addition to the specks in the paint, there are numerous minor scratches in the surface of the paint, not deep enough to show the metal of the case. There are also a few scuff marks, and a couple of small dings in the paint, indentations where something had hit the case hard enough to chip off some paint and leave two depressions that go down to the metal. It’s like it had been jabbed with two tines of a fork. I don’t think it was shipping damage because whatever made the dings would have had to penetrate the packaging, but the packaging was undamaged. I don’t mind the cosmetic condition considering the discounted price I paid, but it does raise questions.

Question 2. ProAudioStar was selling the Pog2 before any of the companies I usually do business with even had them. Where did ProAudioStar get theirs? Were they prototypes, demos, used, b-stock, reconditioned, or something similar? It was odd doing business with them because they would not take my Visa but insisted that I pay with Paypal, which I now regret doing because I don’t have the protection of my credit card in the event that I decide to return the Pog and they claim that I did the cosmetic damage to it. My adult daughter was with me when it arrived and as I unpacked it I showed her the flaws in the finish.

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I mainly play old singalong songs in finger style where I am usually making full chords and playing the melody at the same time, a variant of Travis style. I play on an Epiphone Emporer Regent jazz box with a single floating neck pickup, through a Fender Blues Jr, or for practice a Roland Cube 30. I wanted the Pog to add some variety by having an organ sound on a few songs. The problem I have run into is the tone of the upper octaves. Both of them sound the same, basically like an Irish tin whistle. It is a jaunty sound with a nautical air that works perfectly with a jig like Sailor’s Hornpipe, but it ruins anything serious like The Star Spangled Banner. I have tried not using the +2 octave at all, but the +1 octave sounds just the same albeit an octave lower. I can lower the volume of it with either the +octave slider or the LP filter, but it is such a strong tone that it overrides all other sounds no matter how low its volume. If I lower its volume below audibility then the overall sound is no longer that of an organ. It then sounds like a guitar with odd sounding bass notes. What I have found that sort of works is to lower the + octave until it is almost inaudible, where the Pog hardly seems to be having an effect, then run the signal through a rotary sim to make up for the lack of organ effect from the Pog. This works not only because the + octave is set so low, but also because the rotary effect changes the tone of the + octave to where it no longer sounds so much like a tin whistle. I don’t have a good rotary sim, just what is in some multi-effect units. If I keep the Pog it looks like I will have to buy a dedicated rotary effect box to make it work. The effects I do have are thin sounding, not at all a fat organ sound.

Question 4. Is this the same experience other have with the Pog? I wonder if my unit is operating properly. From the look of the screws the unit might have been opened before I got it. Is there anything inside that could have been tampered with?

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When I play a song like Take Me Out to the Ballgame in G, the melody comes out in that upper octave, but when I listen to a recording of the late Yankees organist Eddie Layton playing it on a Hammond, the melody is in the middle octave, and is very fat. This sound is not even remotely in the Pog, I suppose because it has organ-like sounds for only the upper and lower octaves.

Question 5. Am I correct in assuming that it is just in the nature of the beast that one can’t get that rich Hammond middle octave sound from the Pog because it is not designed to affect the middle octave? If I try to play a melody mainly on the wound strings then I lose the organ sound, but when I go back to the b and e strings then it gets tin whistlely again.

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My post is up against the character limit so I will continue in the reply.