Strymon Engineering Iridium Amp and IR Cab Simulator Guitar Effects Pedal

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 Amplifiers

Our 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.

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® AC30TB)

The amp that defined the guitar sound of the British Invasion. Our model of the AC30TB Brilliant channel 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.

What is Matrix Modeling™? (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.

More Audio Examples

In this video, the people who work at Strymon get out their instruments and play through Iridium! From customer support, to marketing, to engineering, this video features Strymon employees playing through Iridium by itself as well as in combination with other pedals.

Features

Room Ambience (An Amp, Through a Cab, in a Room.)

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.

Analog JFET Front End (Super Quiet, Amazingly Responsive.)

Iridium’s input features an ultra low noise, discrete, class-A JFET preamp circuit providing up to 20dB of pure analog gain. This variable gain JFET circuit is used in concert with DSP to create the tube driven input stage of each of Iridium’s amps. With our hybrid approach you get the best of both analog and digital worlds. The JFET stage acts as an analog front end conditioner, providing exceptional touch sensitivity and dynamic interaction with your guitar while improving noise performance, and the incredibly powerful SHARC DSP facilitates the great level of detailed complexity and responsiveness of each tube amp’s circuitry. This combination of variable gain JFET and DSP is also how we are able to deliver that hot-rodded extra gain at the top end of the Drive knob for the Chime and Punch amps.

Stereo Operation (Stereo Through and Through.)

Iridium is perfect for use with stereo effects in stereo rigs. Iridium’s TS-mono/TRS-stereo input features stereo class-A JFET preamps feeding into a stereo amp driving a stereo speaker cabinet in a stereo-captured room feeding stereo outputs.

Headphone Out (Get Immersed.)

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.

Presets (Everyone Has a Favorite.)

Iridium allows you to save and recall your favorite settings. Simply dial up your favorite sound, and press and hold the Favorite switch to save these settings. Instantly recall these settings with the press of the Favorite switch, or press again to return back to the current knob and switch settings.

MIDI Control (Hidden Superpower.)

Lurking inside your Iridium pedal is a hidden superpower: MIDI Control. Save and load presets with up to 300 preset locations. Control all knobs and switches via MIDI. Integrate Iridium into an elaborate MIDI pedalboard or use in an ultra-compact setup for easy travel. Connect our MIDI EXP Cable to the EXP/MIDI pedal jack to access these features.

Expression (Powerful Expression Control.)

With Volume Mode, you can connect an expression pedal and use it as a Volume pedal, providing a logarithmic taper for smooth volume control. This provides an excellent alternative to a standalone volume pedal. Volume can be set for pre or post amp, cab, and room settings.

Or, use your expression pedal to enjoy a whole new level of instantaneous, continuous control. Set as many knobs as you like for the heel position and toe position of your expression pedal, and all settings will simultaneously morph throughout the full range of the expression pedal.