I hate you both for planting this in my “new posts” attention!
No more, I say! I really cannot justify another reverb and for every word you guys write my gas just fills up in a, soon to be, uncontrollable way 
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Has someone already compared it directly to OTO BAM?
Sorry if someone has already talked about this. I searched, but couldn’t find anything.
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Don’t worry, mate. It’s a piece of shit reverb, really. Like that deuche bag uncle everybody wishes won’t show for this year’s family reunion. You don’t want this.
At.
All.
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This battle is soon lost, I fear 
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I have a friend of mine who owns a BAM, hr applied some of it on some of my tracks for comparison. Soundwise, I’d go for CXM all the time. But the BAM has a few features going for it that makes it more interesting for some.
But I don’t know where you’d find this tone elsewhere, honestly. It’s not like a Strymon, that sounds brilliant but mostly as expected. This one is its own voice.
I’d imagine anyone not wanting to go for a CXM, and you’d accepted the budget for it, would turn it down for that precise thing that defines it, which is its character. There’s lots of stuff you can’t do with it, due to that. Makes me love it even more, tho.
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I’ll be by your side when the time comes. You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.
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Thanks, man!
I have the OTO BAM, and I really like it, but I’m very interested in CXM. I won’t be able to keep them both, so I’ll have to do my research.
The UAFX Golden Reverberator seems very interesting too.
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Welcome to the Club.
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Yeahthis thread is straight up poision for my walle!
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Agggg. This thread won’t go away. Please stop.
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Ok, so here’s what I’ve recorded from both the CXM 1978 and the Mercury7. Mono in and mono out on both to keep files small and make comparison easier. Both units are 100% wet, again to make the work they’re doing easier to compare.
Recordings
Dry
A4 init sound and simple pattern:
Plate Algo
Short
1978:
M7:
Medium
1978:
M7:
Loooooong
(I eventually just cut this off)
1978:
M7:
Hall/Cathedra Algo:
Short
1978:
M7:
Medium
1978:
M7:
Loooooong
(I cut these off, too)
1978:
M7:
Takeaways
Takeaways
My goal here was to see if the 1978 was a “dressed up” Mercury7 — that is, if there was an M7 at the heart of the 1978. Based on these experiments, I’d say “yes”. I could get eerily close to the 1978 with the M7 if (and this is a really big if) I set the 1978 to act like an M7.
In other words, if I used only the Plate and Hall algorithms, (and even Hall, only with diffusion set to “med”), generally kept the treble kicked up, and didn’t get too fancy with the crossover, it was pretty easy to dial in the M7 by turning pitch vector off, pushing density all the way, and then adjusting the lo frequency, hi frequency, and decay pots to sometimes weird and unexpected levels until it sounded the same. So to some extent, the 1978 is “just” an M7 that uses different controls to tweak the same parameters in different ratios — again, if we completely discount the Room algo, the clock, “lo-fi”, whatever the heck is going on with Hall in “low diffusion” mode, and all those in-between values of Treble.
But that’s kind of the thing. Those in-between spaces are what had my head exploding this morning. They were showing me all sorts of sounds I never thought I could get from my M7. Now I’m a little more confident I could, knowing ahead what to look for and given enough time. But I never would have found them with the M7 alone, and I’m tripping over them all the time on the 1978.
There’s also definitely some EQ or harmonic filtering going on that I attribute to Chase Bliss magic dust. Those places where the algos sound meaningfully different, it’s normally come down to a cut or boost or something somewhere. And without fail the 1978 version has always sounded better. That’s not nothing!
So good news for the GASsy: if you’re dedicated and know exactly what you’re looking for, you can totally get a number of 1978 sounds on a budget by picking up an M7 (IMHO, listen above and form your own opinion). But me, I’m still in this place where, even if they sound close enough, the 1978 has made using my M7 feel like I’m working with no thumbs. Now I have to decide if owning a “sweet spot machine” (and the extra algo and clock, etc) is worth the extra price. I’ll wait until after the honeymoon to decide.
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now i’m finally realising that the M7 that’s been mentioned in this thread is another pedal called Mercury 7, and not the Bricasti Design M7 rack reverb 
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My bad! I’m a lazy typer and didn’t know there was an actual M7 reverb out there!
Gotta start saving up so I can do that comparison now 
EDIT: Just realized some may be asking “who cares about this Mercury7 thing with respect to the CXM 1978?”
The context is: the same company (Meris) is responsible for the brains in both. They say the Mercury7 is “Inspired by the Bladerunner film soundtrack,” i.e. Vangelis’s use of extreme tails from the Lexicon 224. The CXM 1978, on the other hand, is an “adaptation of the beloved and famous 1978 studio reverb.” Again, they’re talking about the 224.
So here we have two Lexicon 224-like pedals from the same company with very different price points. That’s why I’m interested in comparing them.
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I still kind of miss my Meris Polymoon from time to time.
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Definitely, I’m curious how much the hardware components, preamp and coloring (compander?!) circuitry work in its favor.
I encourage you to check out the examples above. I think you can hear some audible benefit to the circuitry — this is what I call “Chase Bliss magic dust” in my takeaways above. It’s there. It think it sounds better. But it’s operating so far out in the margins that it doesn’t move the needle for me.
That’s me, though. There are some for whom that “Chase Bliss sound” is the whole ballgame, at least with their other pedals. I imagine @circuitghost has thoughts on this, for example.
And I ended up selling my Mercury 7 and keeping the 1978. But in the end, for me, the decision was 100% about the expanded algorithms and the greater expressivity it gave me within the existing ones. Coloration of the tone didn’t even make it to a spot at the table.
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Well, after a few months with the CXM 1978 now, I can safely say it’s with me on everything, everywhere, and I’m learning new things every time I use it. This pedal is da shit.
I’m biased, tho. I’m not really into external fx or pedals. I’m into Chase Bliss. Only.
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Idk if you guys were aware but the Vongon Ultrasheer is also based off the lexicon but with very stripped down controls and vibrato. I have the Merc7 and the Ultrasheer and the US sounds amazing! I go back and forth between the 2 for outboard fx but tend to lean a little more towards the US. All that said, I now kinda wanna save for the chase bliss version to see how they all compare.
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Surely there’s a way to hide a topic, right?
(said my wife)
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