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.

Go Direct With Gorgeous Tone.

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 AmplifiersOur Matrix Modeling™ 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.

Where Can I Use Iridium?

On Stage

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.

Going direct eliminates the need to mic an amp, giving sound engineers the option to send your amp and cab tone directly to a wedge or in-ear monitors.

Instant adjustments to your tone are right there on your pedalboard, only a footswitch away. With Iridium, there are no menus to wade through—just familiar, responsive amp-style controls for instant, easy adjustment.

in the studio

Iridium provides gorgeous, iconic amp tones, stunningly realistic stereo cabinet impulse responses, and natural room ambience—essential elements for recording guitar in the studio.

Place Iridium at the end of your effects chain and capture stereo amp and cab tones direct into your recording interface.

Or, place Iridium before your delays and reverbs to allow those time-based effects to occur post amp and cab.

Skip the hassle of miking up your amps or having to crank them up to get the tone you desire. Instantly audition amps and cabs with the flick of a switch.

at home

You can’t always crank up an amplifier when you want to play in your living room or rehearse at home.

Plug your favorite set of headphones into Iridium’s headphone jack and get immersed in the sounds of iconic amps and cabs in a natural sounding room.

Integrate Iridium into your pedalboard by placing at the end of your chain and experience your entire pedalboard tones directly in your headphones.

more use cases

Iridium also allows for less common use cases.

Want to use Iridium’s amplifiers but not the IR cabinets? Select Iridium’s Cab Bypass mode, and connect the output(s) to the effects return or power amp input on a guitar amplifier.

Want to use Iridium’s IR cabinets but not the amps? Engage Iridium’s Amp Bypass mode, and connect a preamp or preamp pedal (such as Riverside) to Iridium’s input.

Because the purpose of Iridium is to generate amp and cabinet tones, the primary use case is for direct situations.

It’s not recommended to connect Iridium to a guitar amplifier.

Design

Amp Research & Development

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.

We’re not 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.

Our 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.

Impulse Response Technology

We knew it was theoretically possible to deliver our goal of 24bit 96kHz 500ms impulse responses, but we had to figure out how to do it in practice.

This part of the Iridium project turned out to be a five-year journey through adversity.

We started with a smaller proof-of-concept FFT (fast Fourier transform) based IR convolution with shorter-duration mono cab IRs, kept working on it, and eventually tore it all down and rebuilt so we could deliver the 24bit 96kHz 500ms IR cabs that we’d dreamed of for Iridium.

Hybrid Room Ambience Design

With these amazing amps and cabs, we 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.

The algorithmic portions of our room ambience were dialed in for each room, with delay lines tailored to enhance and meld with each specific space and room size. Creating a seamless transition between IR and algorithm was an intensive and artistic process that ultimately resulted in completely natural sounding rooms that feel great to play in and never distract.

SHARC and ARM Co-Processors

Iridium makes the most of the powerful combination of a high-performance 32-bit floating-point SHARC ADSP-21375 processor working together with an ARM co-processor.

The SHARC is the perfect choice for handling the plethora of FFT instructions Iridium’s real-time sound processing requires, including adding and subtracting simultaneously.

We’ve created an optimized high-speed communications link between the two processors, and have maximized what the ARM co-processor can do.

Each turn of any of Iridium’s knobs sets off a chain of numerous coefficient calculations which we let the ARM co-processor handle, leaving the SHARC free to do its massive computational number crunching full-time at maximum capacity.

Besides stellar sound and responsiveness, this combination delivers super fast patch switching.

The ARM also provides USB connectivity and allows you to very quickly load and audition impulses with our Impulse Manager software.

Iridium is really a new class of device. You get IR resolution never before available in outboard gear, without paying a price in patch switching time, allowing you to select presets seamlessly with the speed you expect for live performance use.

Manufacturing

Iridium, like all of our effects pedals, is built right here in Los Angeles, California.

There are many advantages to building our pedals within minutes of our design shop.

Most importantly, we control every aspect of manufacturing to ensure quality and consistency at every step of the process.

Every potentiometer, encoder, switch, LED, and audio component on every pedal is tested and re-tested.

Using the latest Audio Precision audio analyzing gear, each pedal must exceed our exacting audio quality standards.

Specs

Sound Design

• Three amplifier models crafted using Matrix Modeling™, capturing the subtleties and unique tonal qualities of each amp
• • Round Amp – based on* a Fender® Deluxe Reverb®
  • Chime Amp – based on* the Brilliant channel of a Vox® AC30
  • Punch Amp – based on* a Marshall® Plexi (Super Lead model number 1959)
• Nine Impulse Response speaker cabinets, 24bit / 96kHz 500ms
  Stereo (three per amp type), pre-loaded with a curated set of IRs:
• • Deluxe Reverb 1×12″ by OwnHammer
  • Blues Junior® 1×12″ by CabIR
  • Vibrolux® 2×10″ by CabIR
  • AC30 2×12″AlNiCo by OwnHammer
  • 1×12″ AlNiCo by Celestion®
  • Mesa® 4×12″ by Valhallir
  • GNR 4×12″ by OwnHammer
  • 2×12″ Vintage 30 by Celestion
  • Marshall® 8×12″AlNiCo by CabIR
• Load your own impulse responses using Strymon Impulse Manager software
• Hybrid IR/algorithmic Room control with selectable small, medium, and
  large rooms
• Simple, responsive amp-style controls for Drive, Level, Bass, Middle,
  and Treble
• Premium stereo high impedance discrete JFET analog front end with
  up to 22dB of pure analog gain

Ins, Outs, and Switches

• Stereo Input (requires TRS adapter cable)
• Stereo Output
• Operates at instrument and Line Level input sources
• Discrete transistor headphone amplifier
• Expression pedal input provides seamless morphing between knob positions (Expression mode), or smooth pre/post volume control with logarithmic taper (Volume mode)
• USB jack for connecting to Strymon Impulse Manager software
  to add and edit your own speaker cabinet IRs
• Compatible with Strymon MultiSwitch Plus for remote selection of up to 4 presets
• Full featured MIDI control accessible via EXP Jack for remote parameter control and access to 300 preset locations (requires Strymon MIDI EXP cable or MIDI to TRS interface)

Audio Quality

• Ultra-low noise, high performance 24-bit 96kHz A/D and D/A
  converters provide uncompromising audio quality
• Super high performance SHARC and ARM co-processors
• 32-bit floating point processing

More

• Transparent Analog Buffered Bypass
• Strong and lightweight anodized black aluminum chassis
• 9V DC power supply included
• Power requirements: maximum 9 volts DC center-negative, with a minimum of 500mA of current
• Dimensions:
• • 4.5″ deep x 4″ wide x 1.75″ tall
  • 11.4 cm deep x 10.2 cm wide x 4.4 cm tall
• Designed and built in the USA