DOD fx 30b gate/loop good or bad?

[442w30]

This is one of the cheapest noisegates I have seen available used.
Haven't had a chance to try one, but was thinking of picking it up to mess with.

I know I like the mxr smartgate and Boss NS-1, how bad could this one be for 1/3 the price of the MXR or half an NS-1?

Seems to be priced slightly cheaper than an NF-1 (which I didn't like as much as the ns-2 I used, though I don't remember why).

How would you rank 1,2,3,4 and for overall quality, features, but especially on not sucking tone and the gate function? This is between the NF-1, NS-1, FX30b and smartgate.

I intentionally didn't mention the isp (price) and rocktron hush (too many bad opinions).

[Inazone]

I have one. Complete crap. First of all, like many DOD products, it sucks a lot of tone out of your signal whether it's on or not. Second, I found it almost impossible to find a useful gate setting where it would actually do any good without cutting off too soon. I had actually bought it for both the gate and loop purposes, because I wanted to run a parametric EQ and delay in the "loop" and just use one pedal to activate them, but the two problems I mentioned made it completely worthless to me.

I've kept it, thinking someday I might have a use for it, but that's looking pretty unlikely. Are you looking for a true gate, or just noise reduction? A pedal that will be turned on and off a lot, or something that will be left on all the time? I had one of the Boss pedals (forget if NS or NF) and it had almost no audible tone sucking when turned off. I eventually ended up with an older two-button Rocktron Hush pedal that does a sufficient job and doesn't affect the tone. The most effective was a rackmount Rocktron Guitar Silencer, but that got to be a bit cumbersome mounted to my pedalboard.

[442w30]

Looking for the gate function more so than the noise reduction. Thanks for the warning.

Yeah, I heard so many good things about the older rocktron hush, and nothing but bad about the single button.
Thanks!

[toejam]

Never tried that one, but I own the Boss NS-2 and the MXR Smartgate... both are cool, but I prefer the Smartgate, think it works a little better (too bad it doesn't have a loop built in).