Mooer Radar

Bought the Radar specifically to upgrade the sound my POD HD500X, instead of upgrading to a Helix or Axe FX. Although I still have a lot of experimenting to do, I can already say that the Radar meets (or beats) my expectations and breaths new life into my HD500X. Sofar I have only used it as the final component in the signal chain (1/4 out into the Radar to mixer to headphones/monitors) and the difference in sound is substantial. Used the Radar with my own IR's (replaced the stock ones with the free downloadable editor) and the improvement is well worth the 129 euro's I paid for the device. To my ears it brings to HD500X very close to a Helix.

Tips/Pro's/Con's;
1) Rename your own IR wav's to meet the length limitations of the Radar, prior to uploading.
2) Think about the sequence of your presets, as you cannot move them around after you've saved them.
3) The Radar is NOT a loadbox, so don't connect your head to the radar without a speaker or loadbox attached to your amp.

Pro's
1) Great value for money
2) Poweramp model's and EQ's available allow for finetuning or varying your presets.
3) Great sound
4) Store upto 30 third party IR's into the unit.
5) Well build, small footprint

Con's
1) External unit, so apart from changing presets on your POD, you need to also change the preset on the Radar that you've designated for the POD preset.
2) Seperate adapter (12V DC) required, however appearantly the Mooer should also function on 9V DC).
3) Limited functionality in the editor.

In all, great device, highly recommende.

I got one these based on the reviews I saw from Ola Englund and Pete Thorn. In essence, it's a convolution processor in a compact pedal form factor that's for modelling a guitar power amps and speaker stacks.

It's as deep as Kemper or AxeFX? No. But it is a very usable 3-stage convolution processor that can completely transform a DI'ed preamped pedal tone (e.g. MXR 5150 overdrive) into a "omg that sounds massive" tone - and for very little money.

Latency is sub-2ms so you aren't really aware of it. Impulses are limited to 23ms, which is 1024 samples at 44.1kHz samplerate. This is enough for power amps, speaker cones and close-mic'ed microphone modelling, but not for reverb.

You can also upload your own impulses with the same length limitation, and this will bypass part of the on-board signal chain. Pete Thorn demonstrates that you can use this with add body resonances to contact-mic'ed instruments such as guitar. Very interesting stuff.

The USB connection to editing software seems a bit a flaky to me, but that's the only negative I've found so far.

I bought it to use with my Marshall DSL40CR, to replace its bad sounding headphone out.

I use it only to practice with headphones late in the night. I connect it in the effects send of the amp, to use only the preamp of the Marshall, and it does an amazing job! Great sounding, really easy to use, great amount of IR already installed and the possibility to load your own IR's is a nice feature.

The only con in my opinion is the connection with the Mooer software if you have a Mac, which is my case. The software has a MacOS version, but I didn't manage to make it work in 2 different Macs that I have. It worked only on the PC version. I'm in contact with Mooer to try to solve this issue, and although it's not a dealbreaker, it's very annoying if you want to load your own IR's

Overall a very recommended pedal if you want to have killer tones for your guitar headphone sessions!

Use:

My home studio setup consists of Line 6 Firehawk FX and FR/FR monitors. Being not quite happy with the cabinet simulators included in the Firehawk FX I checked for affordable cab simulators so I decided to give the Mooer Radar. Eventually it became part of my home studio setup, being added to the effects loop of the Firehawk FX.

Pros & Cons:

Two only cons with regards to Mooer Radar - firstly, updating the firmware can be a bit complicated on Mac and secondly - the power supply is actually bigger than the pedal itself. Maybe Mooer should think of a more compact solution.

Besides of these two - amazing sound quality and no issues at all.

Comprehensibility:

Very easy and logical to operate, although the included software is a bit sloppy, but most probably the guys at Mooer will address this issue.

The included cabinet simulations are very good an realistic, the unit is way smaller than I expected (which is actually good), but still it is built like a tank. Highly recommended!

I mostly play modern metal and I was looking for a way to use my pod hd directly to the PA when playing live shows. Due to the fact that I'm not satisfied with the pod's guitar cabinets, I was looking for a way to load 3rd party cabinet IRs, so that I could get a nice, thick, modern metal guitar tone. I was on a tight budget, and I find that this unit delivers what I was looking for. Even the stock IRs sound very good for the price range. It's really nice that you can tweak the IRs (it has poweramp features, eq features etc.) and you can achieve lots of different tones. I've used it for 2 live shows so far, and I didn't have any issues with it. I found it easy to load 3rd party IRs. I can't find any major flaws in this unit, other than the fact that I noticed occational humming when I use it at home (however, I didn't notice any humming in the venues I played). In terms of build quality, I haven't encountered any problems with it so far. All in all I found it to be a worthwhile and pretty decent purchase.