If you look at a product through the lense of what it costs, the actual value of the product will oftentimes elude you.
This is probably the best $ I've spent on any music gear, ever. Hands down. The presence, the punch, the heft, the sustain... using this pedal has done things for my live bass guitar sound that are straight up out of a bass player's sci-fi movie. I was firmly in the camp of bass players who didn't like having too many signal processing devices in my signal chain because I didn't want it to "colour" my sound too much, so I used technique and hardware adjustments for the most part to fix everything I didn't like about my live sound, and that worked fairly well up until a point where I thought I was just going to have to upgrade my bass to get to that next level with my sound. Turns out, I only needed a compressor pedal, and a $ one at that. Who would have thought? The CS400 can do amazing things for your sound, especially in a live setting, but it has to be dialed in correctly; the important thing is getting it dialed in correctly. Affordable equipment that is properly dialed in will always yield better results than more expensive equipment that is not properly dialed in. This is something that many musicians fail to understand. It has to be dialed in correctly.
The four main things that drive up the cost of a product are the number of features, build quality, manufacturing costs, and brand tax. The next time you're comparing two similar products at different price points, ask yourself, "What exactly am I paying more for?" If the answer is not better build quality and/or more features and/or perhaps some reason personal to you then you are simply wasting your money.
Speaking of build quality, this is a well built product. Don't listen to YouTubers and the internet chatter about the plastic housing being a cause for concern. Most people on the internet do not field-test their opinions before they proceed to state them as full-blown facts. If you are going to treat this pedal with any form of decency, and you're going to use this pedal like any rational thinking human being would use their equipment with basic care, it is going to last. If you want equipment that you can throw around like a rock, why not go outside and pick up a rock and throw it around instead? Buy the CS400, try it, dial it in... you'll love it. Just ensure you use it with a power supply (that has the correct polarity) instead of a 9v battery for best results.
