NUX Optima Air

[Marshall]

There are so many good amplification options out there these days that it makes my head spin. At the moment I have 3 front line guitars. A 1957 Gibson J50; a 2 year old Eastman E1SS-LTD-CLA; and an 8 year old luthier made copy of a 1937 Nick Lucas. The J50 and the Eastman have GO AA pickups in them. The NL has a Skysonic Mag/SBT/Mic pickup. And truth is I have minor issues with all of them. I went naked into the sound system with the NL last night at an open mic. I have a gig at that place in a week. It didn't do as well as the J50 a couple weeks ago. But each leaves something to be desired.

So I took out my NUX Optima Air this morning and ran each guitar through it with headphones. And I found multiple programs which helped immensely with the different pickups. Strangely enough the factory installed #9.M D45 PIEZO program does wonders for both the GO AA pickups and the Skysonic pickup. Really quite pleasing. EQ'd straight up. A touch of reverb (25%). And the IR dial at 40 %. Both IR and AMP buttons pushed. Totally eliminated any slight quack. No brittleness. Acoustified the Mag sound nicely too.

Strange, but I'm pretty sure I can work happily with any of these guitars and pickups through the NUX.

Maybe I'll try one more open mic with the pedal next week before the big gig on next Friday.

Crazy stuff. I spin my wheels so much over this stuff. I'd really like to be done with it for a good while.

**sigh** First world problems.

[lkingston]

I have the Optima Air as well. The biggest limitation of it is that the IR level control doesn’t really do a blend of IR and straight signal. I wish it did, because I only like to mix in about 30-40% of even the best IR.

I do find it to be a handy box for capturing IRs though. You need to use a mixer or a mike preamp on the mic to get the level right and to be able to feed it into the 1/4” input. Once captured, the IR is standard format and works really well in any device that can load IRs.

I have it in my Helix Stomp XL, and I also use it with Bias FX2 and as a DAW effect (on both my PC and iPad Pro) with the Nembrini IR loader.

Some people have complained about the XLR output being excessively noisy, but I haven’t run into that myself.

[Marshall]

Just what the heck does that IR wheel on the Optima Air do anyway? The manual is confusing. I get a sense that it's more of a total output volume dial than a mixing of dry and wet signals.

Adjusts the Impulse Response file level, you can tweak it for a well balanced volume with preamp section.

That seems very unclear to me.