Mooer Radar Reviews

Was good for it's price until TC Electronic IR Player released

During long time was the chipest IR player.

+++

Snickers size.

Power AMP sim

Custom IR sounds good

Good UX

Good Software for Windows

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Requires too much power. 2A. not friendly for pedalboard powerplants

Headphones out stopped working after few months

IR name too short on display

Tiny but mighty

An amazing product, my first cabsim device. The ability to use any IR is a must and Radar has it. Navigating with 1 knob is shockingly well executed, it's intuitive and easy, but still a biiit tedious. Also XLR out would be nice but oh well. With a such tiny sized pedal it's no big deal. METAL! 🤘🤘🤘

Good tool and complement for pedalboards.

It brings very good features for the price, the speakers pre loaded are very useable in general but we can load our own IR's.

It can be conected to a PC by USB mini cable and use it's own software for easy access to the various tweaking possibilities and easy of use options such as: different Power amp valve types, various microphone types with positioning options, equalizations, and manage a total of 36 presets that you can store on the pedal.

It has a stereo headphone jack output which i find very handy if you want to put it in the end of your pedalboard signal chain for practice , it will work as your power amp and cab simulator after your pedals.

In my opinion the pocket size/features/sound quality are the main reasons to buy it. You can't get better than the radar for the price, but there are alot more options to consider.

Amazing for headphone use!

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!

Very good, simple and compact IR loader.

I use Radar as a IR loader for Ownhammer impulse responses and do not use istock IR at all - they are not so detailed. For such a small product with a low price the quality is very good. I miss only some on-off switch and for my purpose it would be great if it has the possibility for stereo output to feed stereo reverbs and delays.

REALLY UNDERRATED

LOad your favorite iR's and do anything you want!!

.... personally I am loading my iR's from GGD STUDIO CABS and I am ready to rock.

Very good and simple pedal

Very useful for loading IR's and even using the default ones which come with the pedal. It's small, light, compact and simple to use.

Useful in different circumstances, whether loading AMP Cabinet simulation type IR's or even Acoustic simulation IR's. This is a mainstay on my pedal board and great quality.

Software is slightly clunky, but for a single knob/button pedal, there's not too much to complain about. Keep in mind it does require 12V when planning a pedal board and power

Awesome!

After trying the Iridium by Strymon and not liking that at all I looked for something similar and thought I'd give this Mooer Radar a go. I love it! I just add it after my pedalboard and go direct and the sound is very realistic and amp like. The built in presets give me more than enough options ranging from small Fender combos to bigger 4x12's. A very handy, good sounding, well priced solution with a small footprint.

Jack of all trades

Amazing tech by Mooer. A pedal which is easy to use with your amp or pedals. Very nice and usable interface . you can use the third party irs easily

Lost of sounds

Lots of possible cab sim, I still didn't have time to check everything. Many different type of sounds, good quality but through headphone I could hear some artifacts sometimes at low volume. For the price its really great and I still didnt use the option of loading 3rd party IR

Pretty cool for the price... that 12 v though...

Only downside is the 12v adapter. Apart from that does what it should.

Work horse

I find this as a good cheap Swiss army knife for recording IR's. Gets the job done if you can't be bothered or can not use a loud amp.

UPDATE : A few years later. I thought I would compare my RADAR to the much hyped NUX MG300 and believe me don't bother. The RADAR is far superior when it comes to the actual sounds and reproduction.

Powerful little pedal

Does what it says on the box. Tons of tone shaping options for such a small unit.

User interface is good for a tiny pedal, but PC software could be more user-friendly.

While unit itself has a tiny footprint on your board, the power adapter is almost twice the size of Radar. Thing to bear in mind.

Great pedal, just great

I bought this to plug my guitar straight to the mixer. Because I tour a lot and I started to search how to get away without an amp. This pedal does the job perfectly. Combined with Tc electronic gravity compression pedal and tc electronic Cinders overdrive, it just makes an excellent pedal team.

I purchased this unit in order to use analog pedals without the need for a power amp or speaker cabinet. The pre-loaded impulse responses on the unit are not good by any means, but the unit allows its user to load their own custom impulse responses. This allows me to make an impulse of my own power amp and speaker cabinet, so I can get my own sound without having to carry heavy gear for every show.

My only complaint about the unit is it's terrible user manual, took me an eternity to figure out how to update the firmware.

I wish the unit had an XLR out, that would make it better suited for live use, instead I have to use a DI box to connect it to the FOH.

Magic box!

I use it with Laney IRT studio that have direct output from the whole tube chain (preamp and poweramp), and I use Radar to record without latency or to play with headphones (excellent feature!). Great collection of cabs! Love it! The only thing that I wish it had - global turn off for power amp. I had to turn it off for every model separately. Here is an example of the radar with Laney IRT in the mix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3QbPghg0nI&ab_channel=SergeiVlassov

Huge upgrade for a decent price

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.

Effects pedal

It should be more, but still it is a must.

Great and affordable

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.

Surprisingly great!

This pedal will surprise you. It's easy to use, sounds good right out of the box, but can sound great with good amount to tweaking.