Am i insane for considering This pedal?
Its beautiful in every concievable way, but Im not sure!
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I have it.
I love it.
It’s fantastic.
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I see that they have it in store at TG11 and it made me consider using it as a que send on the Octatrack. I imagine that you can make it do a lot of weird things with midi…
Did I understand it right that it has feedback on the pre-delay?
No idea 
I just tweak it and great stuff comes out of it
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Sounds like my type of pedal 
PRE-DLY
Sets the delay before the onset of the reverb. The range of the pre-delay slider is set by the CLOCK button. Additionally, the HIGH setting of the DIFFUSION button adds a unique smeared feedback to the pre-delay for flanged textures at short times and smooth organic echoes at longer times (see CLOCK for more on this).
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aah ok, I thought it was like the Holiest Grail pedal where you can set the amount of feedback…
Gonna go and RTFM
Not knowing exactly what you mean, cause I’m not all too familiar with the terms here, I can say that the same reverb design can be anything from subtle to extreme, in this pedal, as well as its tails on both the high and mid frequencies, and the balance between them. So there’s the general character of the reverb and then the details around it.
And the hidden delay one of my favourites
This one is such a weird paradox to me. I love the Chase Bliss sound (if not many of their actual effects) and you’ll pry my Mercury 7 out of my cold, dead hands. But the motorized faders are an absolute turn off (not to mention kicking the price up a few hundred, I imagine).
I can’t remember the last piece of gear I was so thoroughly obsessed over but was equally sure I would never buy. I’m not sure what will break the log jam.
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I had better not comment on that. Before I’m done, you’ll have ordered one for sure 
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I’ll just wait until they’re discontinued, buy at whatever price is available, and then curse myself for not having done it sooner like the P12
Seriously, though; do the faders not drive you insane? Or at least strike you as mostly unnecessary? Or are they part of what makes the pedal special and you’d still pony up for the motorized version even if a fictional, non-motorized version were available for less?
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Well, it certainly helps to know the settings when you can actually see them in their true state. From a sound design point of view, it’s a fantastic feature. It’s like having a display for your knobs and faders. Love it.
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I’m with @jemmons, the merc7 is my favorite reverb. I am also curious about this device, largely due to circuitghost’s effusive praise. However, I also struggle with the price. It’s a luxury piece to me… For the moment. Ironically, a microverb 2 I scored for $50 is doing the job right now.
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Okay. I think I’ve figured this out, but would really appreciate it if those with the pedal could evaluate my theory:
This is not a pedal. It’s a desktop mixing unit like the Lexicon that inspired it. It can do sound design, sure, but it’s meant to be “played” at mixing and even mastering stage.
Viewed from this Lexicon lens, a lot of things that seemed like gimmicks make more sense. The lack of standard reverb controls like length or dampening and the focus on EQ bands (which, of course, it shares with the Lexicon). But also faders themselves. No knobs here. This is meant to live on your mixing desk. And that they’re motorized? This makes a ton more sense if one considers recording and playing back automation into a DAW as a primary use case. They’re less about preset recall (my theory goes) and more about the flow of the ’verb over time throughout the mix.
In fact, if anything, the foot switches are the gimmick. A little “hey, we’re still a stomp box at heart” shout out.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t work wonderfully as a stomp box or FX send or whatever else people are using it for. Reverb is, and always has been, a wonderfully versatile tool!
But thinking about it in this light has me reconsidering a lot of things that I was originally very dismissive of with this box. I don’t think I’d use it like this; to ride automation curves in my DAW (I’ve become uncomfortably DAW allergic). But understanding a (potential) purpose behind these features makes it feel less haphazard — more designed. Which is more what I expect from CBA.
So I don’t know. Let me know if I’m crazy. This is all just me trying to justify Yet Another reverb to myself anyway
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You’re clearly talking yourself into getting this reverb I know that vibe when I see it.
Having said that, you’re right in so much that this effect allows itself to be played to great effect, which is how I use it all the time. Since the sliders are quite subtle, you can accomplish a lot of movement with just a little gentle touch of your hand. I tend to use all my Chase Bliss stuff that way, though, since there’s so much going on in their pedals, they’re really more like instruments contained in a stomp box than your classical pedal.
Having said that, this pedal is expensive and I only own three fx units, all of them Chase Bliss, so for me, it fills many roles and purposes. But if I’d had a few already and some of them very decent reverbs already, I would struggle to motivate this purchase. I mean, I have a Chase Bliss Mood and the reverb on that one is great. If I lost my CXM, I could get by with just that.
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Right, so just because you talked me into it - yes you did, don’t deny it - I hooked up the CXM 1978 to the Digitakt, and let two midi LFO’s from the Takt control the mix and pre-delay of the CXM.
Two things -
In this context, yes, the motorized faders drive me absolutely crazy. Dear lord, do I wish I could turn them off right now.
Second - who cares? Applying modulation to this pedal is da bomb.
I’m running one of my two Prophet 12-voices through it, right into the SiX where it’s summed with the other Prophet 12 voice which is doing the bass, and the entire Digitakt on ch1 and ch2 on the SiX, all pushed through the g bus compressor. Sounds absolutely glorious.
And they haven’t even met the Fusion yet.
EDIT: Actually, I run the CXM through the SiX now that I think of it, but I only apply it on one of the Prophet voices. Putting it on the bass makes no sense and the Digitakt doesn’t need it, it gets too muddy. So that one Prophet voice gets a very distinct and distant sound, while the rest of it is pretty dry, like a distant lament to the close up drums and field ambience and stuff.
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If you open it up, there is a switch on the side that disables the motorised faders but will still follow the midi messages.
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Yeah, I’d miss them the most where they’re really useful, so I’ll endure. But thanks for the advice 
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Bunches of words including “Made my M7 sound like a toy”
Ok, to no one’s surprise I found a deal on Reverb and bought one of these monsters. I had a plan.
I was going to really dig in and put it head-to-head with the Mercury7. It’s a Merris reverb, after all. I have a lot of experience with it and love the sound. Reading manuals I thought I recognized a lot of the same parameters between the two. And in YouTube videos, I thought I heard similar artifacts between the ultraplate/plate and cathedra/hall algorithms. “Could the 1978 just be dressed up M7 DSP with fancy motorized faders?” I asked myself. “If I can get close enough to some 1978 sounds with my M7, I can sell the 1978, be out a few bucks, but have put the whole issue to rest in my mind.”
I spent this morning setting up a bunch of representative patches and sequences to A/B between them. Got my mixer configured between the two. Got my sends balanced. Started with the most basic plate settings I could imagine, and…
I feel like an idiot. How many people here said "I tried a 1978 and now I can’t get rid of it.” How many people said “I’ll never sell it. I’m a lifer.” or “It ruined every other reverb for me.” How could I have been so arrogant to think I was different? That I had figured it out?
It made my beloved M7 sound like a toy. In seconds. This wasn’t a “close my eyes and really probe for the nuance” kind of thing. I didn’t have to jump back and forth to different material or even bother dialing in settings. This was a simple, in-your-face, “this is good” vs. “this is bad”, no-brainer kind of affair. There’s literally nothing else to say about it. No write up of clever discoveries or analysis of interesting tradeoffs. Just a straight-forward (and, it feels, rare) case of an effect that cost 3× as much being 3× as good.
So, I don’t know. I usually say "your milage may vary” or some other sort of disclaimer about inherently subjective things like sound. But I’ve got really dumb ears and it wasn’t subtle. This is easily the best reverb I’ve ever owned.
EDIT: So after my breathless first take on this, I sat down to really dig (as I should have to begin with). And I worked out a bunch of stuff with respect to the 1978’s Treble control and the M7’s (criminally underused by me, as it turns out) “Density” alt control.
I was able to get the two much closer to one another after this. I’m going to post samples of both, because my takes are obviously suspect with the gigantic honeymoon goggles I’ve already put on display. But given the limitations of the M7 (only two algos, etc), when comparing apples to apples the ’78 does start to sound more like an expanded and extended M7 (with, maybe, some nice EQing going on in box?)
Anyway, sorry for the over-excited gushing first take, and more in a bit.
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