Are your overdrive/distortion pedal captures adding too much low end?

I’ve been capturing all sorts of amp setups with much contentment. Finally got around to capturing my OCD pedal. When you get to the end of the capture process and are able to compare the CORTEX and REFERENCE signals…the cortex capture has definitely added low end.

To my ears it sounds like a 3-5db boosted shelf below 100hz. Not to mention it didn’t quiet nail the midrange, but it might just sound that way due to the extra low end I’m hearing by comparison.

Anyone else notice added low end on their overdrive or distortion pedal captures?

The ones I’ve done came out perfect as long as I set the input and capture gain at 0dB and was careful about getting the drive and volume settings on the pedal that I wanted before capturing. I do this by using the pedal in a full preset first to make sure it sounds they way I want it to in the capture. Then I can reference the capture block with the pedal using an A/B switch after the capture. These captures need to be listened to in context of a full patch.

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Same for me, I captured a Horizon Devices Precision Drive and I needed to look at the QC screen when doing A/B comparison to know which was which.
Definately no added low end. Not sure how representative this is as the Precision Drive cuts quite some low end

So I tried different pedals, different gain structures on either the QC or my pedals, and ran everything through a spectrum analyzer. All my captures are showing about 3db more low end below 75hz.

This is a pretty negligible area since I’m almost always putting some type of high pass in the chain to fit better in a mix, BUT it still lives in my head a bit because amps and compressors are sensitive to low end and will make them behave a little differently, especially in high gain setups with palm muting. I’m admittedly scrutinizing as one does on a new product—we’re going for utmost accuracy here!

At the end of the day I’m able to get amazing tones with the QC. I’m sure the capture technology (which is already INSANELY close) will only get more accurate with software updates.