If you were looking to trade up your synth pedal, Meris might just have the answer with the newly expanded, the hugely expanded Enzo X.
As sequels go, they don’t get any bigger. This is a pedalboard synth powerhouse that arrives with a laundry list of features. It is bewildering at first blush. Perhaps the best thing to do is to stick a set of headphones on and watch the demo video in 4K high-definition.
Then consult the bank to see if you’ve got £619/$599 to transform your electric guitar into a synthesizer – make that many synthesizers, because there are many modes, many ways you can configure Enzo X.
Meris describes it as a “supernova expansion” and it’s hard to quibble with the marketing bumf. You don’t even need a specialised electric guitar pickup to use it. You will probably need the manual (we would) but Meris promises a user-friendly setup with a UX design that was inspired by its Meris LVX Modular Delay System – a delay pedal Meris claims is the most powerful on the market (it is similarly priced (at £619/$599).
The control layout is nigh-on identical and features the same colour screen display. Like the LVX, Enzo X has 99 presets located across 33 banks, which will be a godsend as you clock up the sounds. There’s also a favourites bank to store your top three.
There are five synth modes – including Mono, Polyphonic and Dry Processing modes. You can run all six of its polyphonic voices simultaneously. There is an array of oscillators and filters, selectable saw, triangle and square waveforms. We also have an ADSR envelope generator for both amplitude and filter.
And it’s performance friendly, with a Hold Modifer Switch and an expression pedal input. It can be run in stereo or mono. There are MIDI connections, too, and if you’re tired of playing this on guitar you can use a MIDI keyboard to play this thing.
If you’re feeling that the synth sounds need an extra little something to bring to the party, there are five different onboard modulation types (chorus, flanger, phaser, vibrato and ring mod) and five different drives (volume pedal, tube, op amp, transistor and bitcrush) and three reverbs imported from Meris’ Mercury X Prism. Oh, and of course there is a stereo delay, capable of 2.5 seconds of delay time.
Under the hood, Meris has kitted this out with an Analog Devices JFET input section, an all-analogue signal path, while using 24-bit AD/DA w/32 bit floating point DSP tech.
The pedal is designed and built in California and we described the pedal enclosure as “gold” but it’s officially described as translucent gold with “subtle metallic flake” so it is sure to look nicer than the pictures suggest.
That display screen is also dimmable. And there are around a thousand different things we haven’t told you yet. You can check out all the specs at Meris. The Enzo X ships from March.
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