Meris repeats its LVX Sound Designer project for its new Mercury X Modular Reverberator - harnessing algorithms from the Mercury 7 and Chase Bliss CXM 1978 along with 3 brand new ones

We all knew this was in the works - it was just a question as to when this inevitable follow-up to the Meris LVX Modular Delay would materialise - and that time is now evidently! This is another one of those supreme Sound Designer style pedals - and is somewhat reminiscent of Strymon’s NightSky ’Design-a-Reverb’ as I kind of referred to it at the time. Both have lots of hidden secondary features, parameters and functions - while the Meris Mercury X of course goes a few steps further in its granularity!

I own and am mostly a fan of the Meris LVX - which is particularly great if you’re just playing off the presets. While it’s relatively tiny screen and nature of operation / manipulation - means that it renders much more as a tabletop device vs a floor-based stompbox. I did not / do not find the screen / interface quite as intuitive as prescribed - it involves a lot of menu deep-diving and the tiny text on screen is rendered pretty much invisible from a standing position - if the pedal is on the floor.

In many ways this sits best alongside the Empress Zoia and Poly Beebo in its nature of operation - which lends it self a lot more towards the tabletop / synth crowd really. And this is quite a different approach to say the Empress Reverb - with its 32 instantly available Algorithms. For the Mercury X you have 8 core algorithms - 2 taken from the Mercury 7 - Ultraplate and Cathedra, 3 from its Chase Bliss CXM 1978 collaboration - enhanced versions of the 78 Room, 78 Plate and 78 Hall voicings - all derived from the Lexicon 224. And then we have 3 brand new algorithms - Spring (Tank), Prism (Dual Tank), and Gravity (sort of Reverb Pad).

The control topology is identical to the LVX as is its operation - of course with some different parameters - and just as the LVX is capable of creating some cool Reverb tones, so is the Mercury X capable of creating various Delay tones too.

I’m not totally sold on the menu-diving, and as mentioned the interface is not as intuitive as you are led to believe. The screen really needs to be a bigger sort of touch screen affair - where you can more easily navigate through all the pertinent adjoining options - while the structure of the navigation is actually a lot more linear and hierarchical rather than properly tangential in how you assemble your specific flavour of Reverb from all the elements available. Those obviously include the core 8 Reverb Algorithms / Structures, Modifiers, Modifier Parameters, PreDelay / Delay Parameters, Dynamics Categories / Elements, Preamp Categories, Filter Categories, Pitch Categories, and Modulation Categories - all listed below in summary fashion.

This is of course a highly complex and capable pedal - where you really need to consult the manual to get to grips with everything that is available to you - MIDI options etc. It’s a fairly pricy proposition at $599 - but considering you’re getting the Mercury 7 ($299) + the Chase Bliss CXM 1978 [minus the sliders!] ($899) and a whole lot more for sort of half that price - it actually turns out pretty good value in the end!

You can read more about the $599 Mercury X Modular Reverberator on the Meris Website - where it’s of course also available for orders, and should be at leading international dealers fairly imminently.

There’s of course plenty of amazing Reverb Workstations already out there and many being more accessible in affordability and operation - while it’s undeniable that this is a pretty special device - as can of course be witnessed in particular via Stefan Fast’s demo below. This is sitting somewhere between Essential and Nice-to-Have for me at the moment - I have a very busy October schedule - and commitments for a month or two. So this won’t be an instant acquisition - but I will look to get it into the reference collection - hopefully this year, but it could be early next! It’s a fantastic device for sure, but not without some challenges - and if you want to operate it successfully it really needs to be part of a tabletop setup!

Here follow all the further details / highlights in summary fashion :