Common Emitter Distortion - is it that bad?

[T-Man]

Would several common emitter stages in series sound that bad when overloaded?  This seems to be what would be the feared transistor sound... I also can't find any projects based on vanilla common emitter amps (the BMP and Obsidian use diodes,fuzz face uses weird feedback)

Is this worth looking into?

Thanks,
TMAN

[zachomega]

Lots of old school fuzzes use this sound.  The Mosrite Fuzzrite does this and a bunch of others. 

-Zach Omega

[Sir H C]

The fuzzface uses CE distortion,  the feedback is DC only when it is distorting, the capacitor on the emitter of the second stage shunts signal to ground so none is fedback when the distortion knob is maxed.

Maestro is another diode free clipper.