HX Stomp vs Strymon Iridium: Which One Should You Get?

The Line 6 HX Stomp can do considerably more than the Strymon Iridium.

More amps. More effects. More routing. More presets. More connectivity. More ways to spend an evening wondering whether the third delay you added to your preset is actually improving anything.

So that should make the HX Stomp the obvious winner, right?

Not necessarily.

The HX Stomp vs Strymon Iridium comparison is interesting because these two pedals can fill a very similar role in a guitar rig while approaching that job from almost completely opposite directions. The Iridium is essentially a compact amp and cabinet replacement built around three classic amp sounds. The HX Stomp is much closer to an entire digital guitar rig squeezed into one pedal.

I tested both in my recording setup, compared their hardware and connectivity, matched similar amp models, recorded them with their stock cabinet simulations and eventually ran both through the exact same custom impulse response.

And the biggest takeaway was not that one sounded dramatically better.

It was that choosing between them has much more to do with how you like to work.

For some context, I bought the HX Stomp with my own money. The Strymon Iridium used for this comparison was borrowed from a friend. Neither Line 6 nor Strymon had any involvement in the comparison.

HX Stomp vs Strymon Iridium: Two Very Different Ideas

At first glance, putting these pedals against each other makes complete sense.

Both can sit on a pedalboard. Both can give you amp and cabinet simulation without needing a traditional guitar amp. Both can go directly into an audio interface, PA or headphones. Both can also become the foundation of a very compact guitar rig.

However, that is roughly where the similarities stop.

The Strymon Iridium is focused. You get three amp models, three cabinet choices for each amp, a room control and the basic controls you would expect to find on a guitar amp.

The HX Stomp gives you a huge collection of amps, cabinets and effects along with flexible routing, presets, MIDI, an effects loop, USB audio and considerably more.

The Iridium feels like an amp pedal.

The HX Stomp feels like a miniature digital rig.

Neither approach is automatically better.

That difference is basically the whole comparison.

Build Quality and Pedalboard Size

Both pedals feel very well made.

The knobs and switches feel solid, and I would happily trust either unit on a pedalboard that gets used regularly. These are not pedals that feel like they need to be treated particularly gently.

The HX Stomp is the larger of the two and has three footswitches instead of the Iridium’s two. More importantly, some of the HX Stomp connections are located on the sides.

That matters more than the measurements alone might suggest.

Once you connect MIDI, headphones or cables to the effects loop, the practical amount of pedalboard space needed by the Stomp increases quite a bit. The Iridium is simpler to squeeze into a small board because most of what you need stays within its compact footprint.

Power is another consideration.

The Iridium runs from a standard 9V DC supply and requires around 500 mA, making it relatively straightforward to integrate with many modern pedalboard power supplies.

The HX Stomp uses a much higher-current 9V supply. I used the dedicated Line 6 power supply, which means you need to account for another power adapter when building the board unless your pedalboard supply can handle the Stomp properly.

That does not make the HX Stomp impractical.

It just means the Iridium is easier.

You are going to notice that theme a few times.

Connectivity: HX Stomp Wins Easily

If connectivity is important to you, the HX Stomp has a huge advantage.

You get separate left and right inputs, MIDI in and out/thru, headphone output, USB connectivity and an effects loop that can also be used for external audio.

That effects loop opens up some particularly interesting possibilities. For example, you can put one of your favorite physical overdrive pedals into the HX Stomp’s loop and then position that pedal almost anywhere within the digital signal chain.

That is extremely useful if you like combining traditional pedals with digital gear.

You can also feed a backing track or another audio source into the Stomp and monitor both the guitar and backing track through headphones. Connect the HX Stomp to a computer and HX Edit gives you much deeper control over amps, effects, routing and presets.

The Stomp can even work as an audio interface and be used for reamping.

There is a lot packed into this little box.

The Iridium still covers the essentials. It supports stereo input through TRS, has headphone output, expression control and MIDI functionality. MIDI gives you control over the pedal’s parameters and access to a large number of presets, although you need the appropriate MIDI-to-TRS connection.

USB on the Iridium is primarily there for managing impulse responses rather than turning the pedal into a full computer-based editing and recording system.

So yes, the HX Stomp wins this section.

By quite a lot.

But whether you actually need all of those features is another question.

The Iridium Is Much More Immediate

This might be my favorite thing about the Strymon Iridium.

It feels almost analog.

You want more gain? Turn the drive knob.

Too bright? Adjust the treble.

Want another amp? Move the switch.

There are some secondary features hiding underneath the surface, but most of the time you can simply look at the pedal and understand what is happening.

I like that.

The HX Stomp is also surprisingly easy to use considering how much it can do. The user interface is well designed, and once you understand the basic block-based workflow, moving around presets and adjusting parameters becomes fairly intuitive.

The display could be bigger, but considering the overall size of the pedal, I think Line 6 found a reasonable compromise.

HX Edit improves the experience considerably when working in the studio. Connect the Stomp to a computer and suddenly that small screen is no longer particularly important. Editing signal chains, choosing models and saving presets becomes much easier.

Still, there is no getting around the fundamental difference.

With the Iridium, you turn knobs.

With the HX Stomp, you build a rig.

I enjoy both approaches, but I know which one gets me playing faster.

Amp Selection: Three Choices or Almost Too Many?

This is where my personal preferences start showing.

The Strymon Iridium has three amp models:

Round is based around the Fender Deluxe Reverb world.

Chime gives you the Vox AC30-style sound.

Punch covers the Marshall Plexi side of things.

Those happen to be three of my favorite types of guitar amp, so I am already fairly well served.

The HX Stomp can cover those same basic amp families, but then it keeps going.

And going.

There are clean amps, low-gain amps, high-gain amps and multiple interpretations of many familiar classics. If you love experimenting with different amplifiers, this is fantastic.

Personally, I can sometimes find that overwhelming.

I am the same person who struggles when a restaurant has a menu containing 100 different pizzas. At some point, more choice stops feeling liberating and starts making me wonder whether pizza number 47 would have been better than pizza number 23.

Gear can do the same thing.

With the Iridium, I have three amps.

Choose one.

Make it sound good.

Play guitar.

There is something very inspiring about that limitation.

Other players are exactly the opposite. If you want to compare several versions of the same general amplifier, build different presets for different songs and experiment with completely different rigs, the HX Stomp is obviously much stronger.

It can even run dual-amp setups, although processing power eventually becomes a limitation depending on what else you put into the preset.

Effects Are Not Really a Fair Comparison

The Iridium has a room effect.

You can select small, medium or large room variations and then control how much of that ambience you want around the amp sound.

It sounds good, and I like having it there. For playing through headphones in particular, even a little room sound can stop a direct amp model from feeling completely dry and disconnected.

The HX Stomp is a full multi-effects unit.

Delays, reverbs, modulation, pitch effects, drives and plenty more are available. You can place them inside presets, change their order and create complete guitar rigs without adding another pedal.

So if you are comparing feature counts, the Stomp destroys the Iridium here.

But that is not completely fair.

The Iridium is not trying to be a multi-effects processor. It is designed to become the amp and cabinet section of a pedalboard where your existing pedals handle everything else.

The HX Stomp can replace the amp, cabinet and most of the pedalboard.

Different tools.

Different jobs.

How I Compared the HX Stomp and Strymon Iridium

For the musical comparison, I wanted the playing to stay identical.

I recorded the guitar tracks as DIs first and then reamped those performances through both pedals. I normally started by creating a sound I liked on the Iridium because it has fewer parameters.

Then I moved to the HX Stomp and tried to match the Iridium sound by ear using a similar amp model.

Gain, EQ and overall character were matched as closely as I could.

I also kept the processing after the pedals identical. If one guitar track received EQ or compression, the corresponding track from the other pedal received exactly the same processing.

That way I was not accidentally making one unit sound better simply by mixing it differently.

For the first comparison, I also deliberately used the stock cabinet simulations from both devices.

I wanted to hear what each pedal could do without immediately replacing an important part of its sound with a third-party IR.

How Do They Sound in a Mix?

Both sounded good.

That is probably the least dramatic answer possible, but it is also the useful one.

I had no problem getting recordable guitar sounds from either device.

There were some differences. On the heavier Marshall-style baritone guitar sounds, the HX Stomp came across slightly more aggressive and punchy to me.

The Iridium version felt a little softer and more restrained.

That was probably the largest obvious difference in the full mix.

Otherwise, the sounds were surprisingly close considering that the cabinet simulations and internal modeling are different.

And once the guitars are sitting alongside bass, drums and everything else in an actual mix, those differences become even less important.

If your question is simply whether you can record professional-sounding guitar tracks with either the HX Stomp or Iridium, I would be comfortable using both.

The Same IR Test Made Things Even More Interesting

The next test removed another variable.

I disabled the cabinet IRs on both pedals and used exactly the same external Vox AC30 cabinet impulse response in Logic.

The IR came from the Warren Huart Lancaster Audio collection, and both tracks used exactly the same IR settings.

Then I matched the amp sounds by ear and did a blind comparison.

Track one was the HX Stomp.

Track two was the Strymon Iridium.

Once both amp models were running through the same cabinet IR, the difference became very small.

I am sure you could spend considerably more time adjusting the settings and get them even closer. My goal was not to spend three days matching waveforms under a microscope. I wanted to see how close a guitarist could realistically get by listening and adjusting the controls.

The answer was: pretty close.

That is important because it suggests that the decision between these pedals should probably not be based on the idea that one contains some magical level of amp modeling that the other cannot approach.

The workflow is the bigger difference.

One Thing About the HX Stomp Amp Controls Annoys Me

There was one part of the amp matching process that made me prefer the Iridium.

Line 6 gives you additional amp-model parameters that do not always correspond directly to the controls you would find on the original amplifier.

I understand why.

More control lets you shape the model more precisely, and plenty of players will consider that a strength.

For me, it occasionally makes things more complicated than necessary.

The Vox-style model was a good example. On the Iridium, the Chime model uses the middle control in a way that makes sense for the original Vox-style circuit. I could get the sound I wanted fairly quickly.

Matching that on the HX Stomp required much more adjustment.

If I know how a real AC30 works, part of me wants the digital version to behave in roughly the same way.

Give me the familiar controls.

Let me turn them.

Let me get on with my life.

This is completely personal, though. Someone who enjoys detailed amp editing may see those extra controls and immediately prefer the HX Stomp.

Who Should Choose the Strymon Iridium?

If your goal is to build a traditional pedalboard around an amp modeler, I think the Iridium makes an incredibly strong case.

You already have overdrives, modulation, delay and reverb pedals that you like. You simply need something at the end of the chain to replace the physical amplifier and cabinet.

That is where the Iridium makes sense.

It is compact, straightforward and difficult to make sound genuinely terrible. The three amp choices cover an enormous amount of guitar music, and you can replace the cabinet sounds with your own impulse responses if you want to take things further.

There are enough options to keep it flexible without turning every practice session into a programming session.

That balance works very well for me.

Who Should Choose the HX Stomp?

The HX Stomp makes more sense if you want one compact unit that can become practically your entire rig.

Maybe you need different sounds for different songs.

Maybe you want presets.

Maybe you need MIDI control.

Maybe you want delays and reverbs without bringing another pedalboard.

Maybe you need an audio interface, reamping options or flexible routing in a recording setup.

That is why I originally bought mine.

I wanted a versatile multi-effects unit for the studio that could work alongside my other amps and pedals. For that job, the HX Stomp is excellent.

I could also easily see myself taking just the Stomp to a small live or church gig. Load the sounds you need, plug into the PA and you have an absurd amount of capability in a very small box.

That versatility is the whole point.

HX Stomp vs Strymon Iridium: Which One Would I Choose?

This depends entirely on the job.

If I needed a versatile multi-effects processor and complete digital rig, I would choose the HX Stomp.

It does considerably more. The amp selection is huge, the effects are excellent, the routing is flexible, and the combination of presets, MIDI, HX Edit and USB functionality makes it far more powerful than the Iridium.

However, if I were building a pedalboard around an amp modeler, I would probably choose the Strymon Iridium.

That may sound strange after spending half the article explaining all the things the HX Stomp can do that the Iridium cannot.

But I like the simplicity.

Three really useful amps. Good cabinet sounds. Custom IR support. Straightforward controls. A little room ambience.

Done.

Sometimes having fewer options makes me more creative because I stop thinking about which amp model I should choose and start thinking about what I should actually play.

The sound comparison did not give me a clear winner. With similar amps and especially the same cabinet IR, both units can get remarkably close.

The workflow gives me a winner depending on the situation.

And that is probably the best way to choose between them.

Final Thoughts

The HX Stomp and Strymon Iridium are both excellent compact solutions, but I do not think they are really trying to be the same product.

The Iridium is an amp replacement.

The HX Stomp can be the whole rig.

If you want physical controls, a limited selection of classic amp sounds and something that integrates easily into an existing pedalboard, the Iridium is wonderfully straightforward.

If you want maximum flexibility, presets, effects, routing and the ability to build complete rigs inside one pedal, the HX Stomp is in another league.

Sound quality would not be the deciding factor for me.

Both can sound very good.

Instead, think about what happens after you switch the pedal on.

Do you want to choose between three amps and start playing?

Or do you want an entire guitar rig waiting to be built?

Your answer to that question probably tells you which one to buy.

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