In my ever-continuing search for great tone I've come to the Budda Zenman. I haven't had any experience with Budda amps or pedals before, so I didn't know what kind of tone to expect.
I brought the pedal with me to rehearsal and used it more or less the whole time. Instead of using the lead channel on my Studio preamp I'd switch in the Zenman, and I also used it on some parts where I'd usually play clean. Combined with some testing when I brought my rig back home I'd say I'd given it a pretty thorough workout.
What do I think of it then? I think it's a really great pedal! Unfortunately for me it doesn't go really well together with my Studio preamp's clean settings, it becomes too bright, but apart from that I dig how it sounds. The Zenman has bass and treble controls, but they do not really roll off the low/high end like I'm used too. Instead they work on a much narrower band, limiting the amount of high/low end you can remove. Since I have my Studio preamp set brightly to sound like a Fender amp this ends up as being too far on the bright side for my taste. On the other side it seemed to add a bit of real bass, while staying away from the low mids. Added a nice touch in my case.
The thing I really dig about the Zenman is the way it lets the tone of the strings shine through. I found it to be more of a clean sound with overdrive than a normal distortion, and then you can adjust the amount of overdrive you want with the gain control. At max you'll be around where you have only distortion, but there's lot to be had in between there and the lowest setting. The tone reminds me a lot about Lukather's crunch sound, except that I use a lot less gain. Chords never sounded muddy, and it's got the right oomph with muted strings (listen to "Freedom" on Lukather's "Candyman" and you get the idea).
Due to its tone I found it to work particularly well for chords and things needing a bluesy kind of overdrive (on the bright side of that), while I didn't like it at all for power chord stuff. Turn the gain up and it might work well for grunge and punk, but you still need to stay off the power chords. It lusts for complexity, so play regular chords.
The Zenman runs on 12V AC (1A) using a wall wart. As usual there's pros and cons about that, con is that it gives you another wall wart to bring around, pro is that you can get the pedal overseas without any hassle. It's got two 12ax7 tubes protected by a cover, so they won't break if anyone steps on the pedal too hard. Getting the cover off is easy, just unscrew the two thumb screws, so swapping the tubes shouldn't be difficult. It's still solidly built though, steel all around, it should take a beating without a problem. And it's got the usual silent switching and true bypass everyone wants.
Bottom line: rocks as a crunch channel, but too bright in my setup.