Strymon Iridium
Now there is a pedal that truly delivers the sound and feel of a world-class tube amp driving a perfectly matched speaker cabinet in a great sounding room. Iridium gives you three iconic amplifiers, nine impulse response speaker cabinets, and lush room ambience. 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.
Leave Your Amp At Home
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.
Three Iconic Amplifiers
Our Matrix ModelingTM process captures all the subtleties and unique tonal qualities of each amplifier. We’ve taken three iconic tube amps with distinct characters and mathematically modeled every aspect of their circuitry with absolute precision to deliver the response, feel, and inspiring experience of playing through the original amps at their best. Taking the process a step further, we’ve hot-rodded each amp to provide an extended range of tonal options beyond what was available from the original designs.
Nine Stereo IR Cabinets
Iridium’s speaker cabinets offer a level of realism and responsiveness unprecedented in outboard effects. Iridium delivers full stereo 24bit 96kHz resolution for the entire 500 milliseconds of its speaker cabinet impulse responses. Until now, IRs of this resolution have only been available for use within studio recording software. Iridium’s breakthrough technology means you can use the very best impulse responses available, bringing maximum realism to your pedalboard.
Adjustable Room Ambience
Iridium’s hybrid room reverb combines a 256 millisecond stereo impulse response with Strymon’s reverb tank algorithm for extended decay. This combination places your amp and cab in a natural sounding room (small, medium, or large), creating a space for your amp to open up and breathe.
The Amps We’ve Always Wanted
- Round Amp - Based on a Fender® Deluxe Reverb:
The Deluxe is one of the most recorded amps in history for good reason. This amp is clean, bright, and mid-scooped, with plenty of headroom. At higher Drive settings it delivers an overdriven sound unique to its architecture. We chose the Deluxe’s Normal channel for its round tone that plays well with pedals. While preserving access to all the tones originally available with this channel, our model gives you something extra: a midrange control. With the midrange at noon, you get the original fixed-resistor value and standard tonal characteristics of the Deluxe. Turn down the midrange for a more scooped sound, or turn it up for tweed-era tones.
- Chime Amp - Based on the Brilliant channel of a Vox® AC30:
The amp that defined the guitar sound of the British Invasion. Our model of the AC30 Brilliant channel (Top Boost) is jangly, bright, and chimey, providing air for subtle passages with a light touch, and bite when you want to dig in. For this amp, the Middle knob acts a Tone Cut knob, providing high-end roll-off just before the power tubes, per the original AC30 design. In addition to the full available gain of the original amp, toward the top end of the Drive knob’s range of travel, we’ve added a frequency-shaped front end boost to tighten the low end while driving the amp further into saturation.
- Punch Amp - Based on a Marshall® Plexi (Super Lead model number 1959):
This powerful amp is meatier, with higher gain than the other two amps, and has a powerful midrange response. This amp features a buttery, smooth overdrive. At higher Drive settings it will deliver all the high gain distortion and growl this amp is known for, and then some. Setting the Drive control at around 2 o’clock gets you the maximum gain the original Plexi design allowed. Beyond that, our model has some additional gain on tap, giving you access to custom hot-rodded Plexi high gain tones.
*All product names are trademarks of their respective owners, which are in no way associated or affiliated with Strymon. These product names, descriptions and images are provided for the sole purpose of identifying the specific products that were studied during Strymon’s sound design process. Fender and Deluxe Reverb are registered trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. Vox is a registered trademark of Vox R&D Limited. Marshall is a registered trademark of Marshall Amplification Plc.
A Carefully Curated Cab Collection
Iridium comes pre-loaded with a carefully curated collection of premium cabinet impulse responses from OwnHammer, Celestion, cabIR and ValhallaIR.
- Round A – Deluxe Reverb 1×12” by OwnHammer
Impulse captures a vintage Fender Deluxe Reverb open back 1×12” combo loaded with a 1978 Fender CTS ceramic 12” speaker.
- Round B – Blues Junior 1×12” by CabIR
Impulse captures a 1×12” Blues Junior cabinet, loaded with a Jensen C12N speaker.
- Round C – Vibrolux 2×10” by cabIR
Impulse captures a Fender Vibrolux from 1965 with 2×10” Jensen C10NS speakers from 1965.
- Chime A – AC30 2×12” Alnico by OwnHammer
Impulse captures a Vox AC30/6 open back fawn 2×12” combo with 2001 Celestion T0530 Blue AlNiCo speakers.
- Chime B – 1×12” Alnico by Celestion
Impulse captures Celestion Blue Alnico speaker in a closed back 1×12” cab.
- Chime C – Mesa 4×12” by ValhallaIR
Impulse captures a 4×12” Mesa Boogie “Halfback”, which is loaded (open back) with two Black Shadow MC-90 speakers from CelestionTM and two Black Shadow EVM12-L from ElectroVoice.
- Punch A – GNR 4×12” by OwnHammer
Impulse captures a 1971 Marshall 1960B “basketweave” 4×12” cabinet.
- Punch B – 2×12” Vintage 30 by Celestion
Impulse captures a Celestion Vintage 30 in an open back 2×12” cab.
- Punch C – Marshall 8×12” Alnico by cabIR
Impulse captures a re-issue of the 1965 Marshall 8×12” full stack cabinet, loaded with Celestion T652 AlNiCo speakers.
Load Your Own Impulses
It’s easy to replace the pre-installed IRs with custom IRs from your own collection by using Strymon Impulse Manager software.
Amp Science
Our Matrix Modeling process captures all the subtleties and unique character of each amplifier. From the unique composition of each tone stack, to component values, bias levels, corner frequencies, and tube stage gain; all of these factors affect the way a note or chord reacts and evolves over time, and all have been mathematically modeled with the highest fidelity. We included multi-stage power sag, so that the sag response and time constant for each stage of the amplifier is modeled separately, adding further harmonic complexity and realistic feel.
We also modeled the compression, limited cone movement, and speaker distortion that can happen at high signal levels. We carefully set the range and taper for each knob to make it easy to dial in a variety of great tones with intuitive, predictable amp-like responsiveness. Combining the meticulous reproduction of original circuits with careful fine-tuning has resulted in three stellar amp models that deliver the response, feel, and inspiring experience of playing through the original amps at their best.
Tone Stacks That Hit All The Sweet Spots
Aggressively boost the treble, and Iridium beautifully reveals all the subtle nuances of even the softest fingerstyle playing. Crank the bass, and enjoy resonant low end that will make you swear there’s an amp in the room even when monitoring through headphones. True to the tone stacks of the classic amps we modeled, Iridium’s tone controls have the same interdependences as found in the original circuit designs. Iridium gives you amp EQ that is a joy to use, yielding a wide variety of great tones in any direction you go.
Impulse Response Technology
Impulse responses allow the sound and character of a mic’d speaker cabinet to be captured, so that any audio signal can be processed by the resulting impulse response and sound as
if it’s being played through that exact speaker cabinet. Iridium is able to deliver impulse response resolution far greater than any other piece of outboard gear.
With full 24bit 96kHz resolution for the entire 500 milliseconds of its speaker cabinet impulse responses, Iridium is able to use the absolute highest quality IRs available. This means countless details are accurately preserved and reproduced to give you a completely real speaker response. Every cabinet resonance, speaker vibration, as well as reflections between the cabinet, the mic, the floor, and the ceiling; all the minuscule cues that tell our brain we are listening to our favorite cabinet are preserved, providing completely lifelike realism.
