Nothing reveals the true nature of your guitar and your playing like a world-class tube amp driving a perfectly matched speaker cabinet in a great sounding room. Now there is a pedal that truly delivers that sound and feel, with simple controls for effortlessly dialing in the perfect amp tone when going direct. Discover inspiring tube amp responsiveness, unprecedented impulse response speaker cabinet realism, and controllable natural sounding room ambience.
Iridium gives you three iconic amplifiers, with a total of nine impulse response speaker cabinets that complement the tonality of the amp. Skip the hassle of lugging around or miking amps. Place Iridium on your pedalboard and send gorgeous stereo amplifier tones, stunningly realistic cabs, and lush room ambience direct to a recording interface or PA system. With Iridium, it’s a snap to dial in a direct tone that will truly inspire and sound great whether you are monitoring through in-ears, floor wedges, reference monitors, or studio headphones.
Want to play live with the exact same tones that you use at home or in the studio? Or have access to multiple amp and cab setups without having to lug them on stage? Leave your amps at home, and connect Iridium directly to the house PA system. Alternatively, Iridium provides gorgeous, iconic amp tones, stunningly realistic stereo cabinet impulse responses, and natural room ambience—essential elements for recording guitar in the studio. Finally, you can’t always crank up an amplifier when you want to play in your living room or rehearse at home. Plug your favourite set of headphones into Iridium’s headphone jack and get immersed in the sounds of iconic amps and cabs in a natural sounding room or engage the bypass modes and use Iridium's amp or IR cabinets alone with a separate power or preamp.
Iridium features a hybrid room ambience design that combines 256ms impulse response captures of real rooms for realistic early reflections, with an algorithm for extended decay and modulation. This combination places your amp and cab in a natural sounding room, creating a real space for your amp to open up and breathe. In addition to controlling the amount of room ambience, you can also choose a small, medium, or large room.
Delivering the complete experience of playing into an amp through a miked cab in a room is a research and development project that has been years in the making. The amp development began in the tube emulation and cascading gain stage topography created for Riverside, and then majorly leveled up for the intense degree of real-time calculation Matrix Modeling™ required to create Iridium’s amps. Strymon aren't just talking about the perfectly recreated tone stacks, but also things like the treble bleed on the gain controls, multi-stage power supply sag, and preamp and power amp tube emulation. Their talented and tireless engineering team covered quite a bit of new ground on the way to recreating these classic amp designs with exact mathematical fidelity, and then expanded the capabilities of each amp in musically useful ways, giving you the full range of original amp sounds, and then some.
With these amazing amps and cabs, Strymon wanted to create amazing spaces for them to live and breathe in. When you are playing in a physical room, the first 80 milliseconds or so of early reflections are what really tell your brain what type of space you’re in. The complexity of those myriad early reflections are very difficult to simulate with an algorithm. That’s where impulse response technology is the perfect tool for the task. After a certain duration, however, impulse responses become computationally expensive, and that’s where the algorithm shines: on the long tail.