Nux Optima Air NAI 5

EQ is great; not sure about the IR

I use this with a mandolin and tenor banjo; EQ is very sensitive and powerful. I haven't made my own impulse response yet; I did buy one from SIGMA, and downloaded others. Many are noisy and I haven't found one yet that enhances the sound of either instrument.

Nux Optima Air NAI 5

For a while I was looking for a good preamp for the three main acoustic guitars I use on stage, being a 1973 Martin D-35 and an Eastman 422AC, both equipped with a LRBaggs VTC pickup and a custom built Farmer 00 rosewood, with a Fishman Ellips Blend (piezo/microphone combi).

I considered the LR Baggs Voiceprint ( wich is way more expensive) but while looking for reviews I ran into this NUX pedal and I was impressed by a few very good reviews.

The price is amazing and I decided to order it.

I've been playing with it for a week now and it gets better and better.

I think a few of the IR's are very good for what I want (the Martin D-45 piezo is my favorite so far) and there are certainly some more that will work with other guitar with magnetic pick ups. So realize that not every preset will work on your guitar. Then there's the possibility of capturing your won guitar. I did that, with some high quality stuff (I own a recording studio), but so far the results are not as good as some of the prestes. Well, work in progress!

The eq section is really very good and works like a charm. It's works at the right frequencies, is subtle and very important for the tweaking of the sound. It is based on the Neve 1073 eq and that is of course a classic!

The reverb is imho a bit of a bummer. Not impressive at all.

I use a dedicated reverb in the loop of the pedal, together with a compressor limiter and that works great. XLR output is nice, no DI needed. The software that you can download is simple but does the job, so editing through the USB-port is easy.

All in all a very nice pedal that quit intuitive, but really deserves some time getting to know it really well. It's, like always, in the details to make it sound the best! Great value for the money, so that's why I give it 5 stars!

Great natural sound

In my opinion this is one of the easiest ways to get rid of the metallic clunky sounds that you hear when you use a pickup in your acoustic guitar AND at the same time it saves you the hassle of miking your acoustic guitar.