Thanks for your reply!
I don’t know what’s meant by moistening - if it’s to do with the wet/dry mix: as long as this isn’t changed during performance it works fine. It’s only a problem if you have the volume low, want to have a wetter mix and turn then knob clockwise while holding the pedal’s equivalent of a shift button to colour the mix. Afterwards, if you touch the volume knob again, the volume jumps to the very loud clockwise position.
If “moistening” got to do with humid climate: I did my tests at room temperature with maybe 50-60% relative humidity. Regarding the possibility of me having received a faulty unit: I think that’s absolutely possible (and in a way I hope that that was the case). I ordered online and so had no other unit to compare it with.
The manual mentions some noise at higher pre-gain settings in combination with compression but in my (obviosly subjective) opinion it was significantly too much (and i’m okay with a little noise).
As far as i know at least the Eurorack version of the Golden Master has an always-on noise gate installed, but if the pedal has one too, it either didn’t engage on my unit or the base level of the noise was too high.
If you got the option to test the pedal and return it if it doesn’t fit your needs, I’d say go for it. I think it’s a great concept and there’s next to nothing comparable on the market at that price point.
For the time being, I decided to keep with the EQ and compressor on my bluebox - it lacks visual feedback, but maybe that makes me better at gauging compression by ear in the long run …