Meris MercuryX

Although, at heart, this is ‘just’ a stereo reverb pedal, it’s capable of some very unusual sonic treatments...

The world is awash with reverb pedals, but if you want to go beyond the boundaries of conventional reverb and head out into sound‑design territory, I’m pretty sure that the MercuryX from Meris will tick all your boxes and then some. Meris tell us that the MercuryX is built upon their Mercury7 (reviewed by Bob Thomas in SOS August 2018) but that it includes both some additional algorithms and some very imaginative processing and routing options. While all the studio classic reverbs are here and modelled to a very high standard, it’s the more creative reverb algorithms and processing combinations that have really had me struggling to confine my bank card to my wallet! And since the operating levels can be switched to accommodate guitars and synths or line‑level sources, it could therefore appeal to guitarists, keyboardists and mix engineers alike.

In addition to the choice of eight reverb algorithms (more on those later), there’s a stereo pre‑delay of up to 2.54 seconds with the option to add feedback. Each channel of the pre‑delay can be set independently to different note values if required. Why such a long pre‑delay? The delay lines can be modulated, HF damped, filtered and configured for cross‑feedback, with routing that allows any of the processing elements to be inserted into the pre‑delay’s feedback loop as well as before or after the pre‑delay. This routing flexibility enables the core Reverb Structures, Types and Processing Elements to be combined in numerous ways to create uniquely creative effects, and is key to the creation of some of the less obvious reverb treatments. Meris have also created what they call a Deep Modifier Section that enables control signals such as LFOs or envelopes to be routed to specific processing parameters, rather like a synth’s modulation matrix. There’s a Stereo Freeze function and a Hold Modifier Switch for ringing the changes during performance. Unusually for a reverb pedal, you also get a tuner.

Hardware

Physically, the MercuryX is a fairly large pedal, with four footswitches, six generously spaced control knobs, and a colour display in the centre of its front panel that provides both graphical and text information. The inputs and outputs, located on the rear panel, are dual quarter‑inch jacks, and make possible any permutation of mono or stereo in and out. While the pedal’s effects are digital, a great deal of attention has been paid to the sound quality of the analogue stages, which include an Analog Devices JFET input stage and an analogue mix bus. On the digital side of things, this pedal has 24‑bit A‑D/D‑A conversion, and the 32‑bit floating‑point DSP runs on an ARM processor. Power requirements are 9V, centre negative at 300mA or more; there is no included PSU, but most people using this class of pedal will probably have a good pedalboard power supply.

The hardware can store 99 presets, all of which can be edited, and there’s a software control/librarian app on the way too (it wasn’t available at the time of writing, but I expect it to be out by the time you read this). The presets are saved within the pedal as 33 banks of three presets each, and all are directly accessible using the footswitches, which are used in pairs for changing banks and then for selecting the...