So... here's how I feel after about 4-5 hours of messing around with it. I've not gotten into modifiers or expression pedal control yet, so won't get into that just now..
The good:
- Right off the bat, it sounds great. It really does. And on the whole, very inspiring to listen to and play through.
- Really nice oscillations, and really pliable too; you can dial in tons of different types of characteristics to your oscillations. Want high and squealy? You got it. Want low and rumbly? You got that too. Want it very solid, almost like blocks of square-waves? You can do that. Want it modulated and warbly? You can do that too. This goes for all modes too - the digital can sound just as good (and gooey!) as the BBD and Magnetic modes.
- Speaking of the digital mode; it is excellent. There is no milking out of the delay echoes here, not like what you get on Helix. You get a really nice consistent number of echoes when the feedback is at 50%, again unlike the Helix.
- I really like the magnetic mode.
- The 'Cassette' and 'Granulize' effects are extremely unique. Not a lot of delays offer these. There are a bunch of sounds from the cassette effect that I think I could approximate on my Axe FX III, but I don't think the Axe FX III will do anything like the granularize. Both of these work extremely well in the feedback loop of the delay. These are almost worth the price of entry by themselves if you're into those kinds of sounds.
- For most typical delay sounds, you actually don't need to use any of the additional effects pages. You can stay on the delay page and tweak feedback, mix, time, dampening, delay type, and structure.. and that already gives you loads and loads of different sounds without you being required to tweak it to death. I actually wasn't expecting this, so kudos to Meris for at least making the main page give you most of what you need.
- The spillover behaviour between presets is excellent. Probably best in class for an individual stomp box.
- The noise gate feature is a really nice touch, especially when using the pedal in front of a high-gain amp channel. Even setting it to 0% clears up a lot of additional noise. It is quite a bit quieter than the Timeline when using it like this.
- It can do a lot of quite diffused and reverby tones as well as delay. I really enjoy that aspect of the pedal.
The bad:
- I do think the workflow is a bit confusing, but not as confusing as it was when I tried it for the first time last year. I only had 10-20minutes with it that time, so it is slowly sinking in. But it shouldn't take 5 hours for a delay pedal to begin to feel intuitive; even for one as complex and capable as this.
- For example, I keep turning the presets/page knob to try to adjust parameters, instead of the knob on the right under the screen. So I end up paging when I meant to adjust dampening, for example.
- As it turns out, the floaty space bubbles mode is more intuitive than the supposedly more intuitive text mode. At least for me. This is subjective, YMMV.
- I'm not sure I really like the sound of the 'bbd' mode. There is way too much clock noise for my tastes. Using the dampening control to remove the clock noise kills too much high-end. There is no control over the number of chips like there is on Helix Adriatic Delay and Boss DD-500, and I'm quite surprised at this omission. The core dBucket sound of the Timeline sounds a lot clearer and better to me, it doesn't have as much clock noise at the same tempos, and ultimately is cleaner.
- It probably will take some time to get my head around it, but I find the fact that the left and right delays are both audible even when running the pedal in mono, to be a little confusing. It also means in a typical "straight into the guitar amp" scenario, you often end up having to tweak parameters that you shouldn't really need to tweak; namely delay left/right divisions. Maybe there is a way to link them? Not sure. It isn't a deal breaker, just a bit confusing.
- I strongly feel that "reverse" shouldn't be a structure. Rather it should be an additional option that all of the structures have. But maybe I'm being picky there.
- Although saying that, the reverse mode is sometimes quite clicky when in digital mode and using the dampening feature. You can hear the end of the delay buffer not properly crossfading. Quite off-putting.
- I've noticed when adjusting some parameters you will sometimes get clicks in the audio output. These tend to be top level parameters that you wouldn't assign a modifier to, like structure type, delay type, and things like that.... but they could do with making that a bit smoother.
- Sometimes when tweaking parameters, the value jumps around way too quickly. Putting the time into bpm mode for example, if you want to scroll from 100bpm to 130bpm, you'll often find the pedal will jump massive values in a very unnatural way.
- There simply HAS TO BE a better way to present the multi-tap and multi-filter modes. I don't know what, but separating out all 8 tap parameters the way they have is probably the most boring time I've had tweaking an effect. Editing the taps (pan, level, Q, frequency) for these two structures just isn't inspiring at all. Most of the time I'm finding I tweak a few things on them, get bored and impatient, and move on to a simpler mode. I guess a boatload of "tap presets" would help here.
So that is where I'm at with it now. I am enjoying it, but it certainly isn't perfect, and for the price point... I definitely expect closer to perfect than it is. It pairs really well with the Timeline and BigSky, and I can definitely see the Meris earning its place in my rig. But it is going to take a lot of work to get there. It isn't plug and play like the Timeline is.
