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Review

2008.02.01

The Americans had their  Echoplexes, the Germans  had their Klempts and the  Brits had their WEM  Copycats. These old tape  echo units were noisy, the pitch was  unstable and their unbalanced Hi-Z  inputs and outputs were really designed  for use with guitars and amplifi ers. But  despite all these technical  shortcomings, they made such a  distinctive sound that many are still  prepared to tolerate the hassles  involved with using them in the studio.

So it's interesting that Unity Audio,  in conjunction with Blue Coconut, has  introduced a brand-new tape echo  machine for the 21st century – the Echo  Verb. The company commissioned Terry  MacDonald, a former WEM consultant,  to design the Echo Verb from the  ground up. Blue Coconut's aim was 'to  eliminate all the problems associated  with early tape echo machines,  improving the performance, while  retaining the unique analogue tape echo  sound which has never been achieved  through digital devices'.

The Echo Verb's electronics have  been tweaked to achieve low noise  levels and you can select any  combination of six playback heads.  Particular attention has been given to  eliminating wow and fl utter, the pitch  modulations commonly associated with tape machines. This has involved  redesigning the tape transport  mechanism and the flywheel.

Head count

Tape echoes typically have three or four  replay heads and one record head. The  record head prints the signal onto the  tape and you select one or more heads  to replay it. The delay time is determined  by the speed of the tape and the  physical distance between the record  head and the playback heads. The Echo  Verb has six playback heads plus a  speed control, making delay times up to  746ms possible. Additionally, when  heads are de-selected they are also  muted to minimise noise.

The front panel has a jack input for  instruments along with a separate jack  insert and return for guitar pedals and  an echo on/off jack footswitch. On the  rear of the unit, line-level transformerbalanced  XLRs are provided for  professional studio applications. The  front panel controls include input gain,  echo level, variable speed, sustain and  output levels, along with tone/EQ and  echo bypass.

Wow and flatter

If you set things up correctly and  carefully, the noise floor is extremely low  and there's no 'bump' as the splice joint  of the tape passes over the selected  heads. The trick is to use the front panel  VU meter and your ears to set the  highest possible input level. The display  fl ashes red to indicate overload and the  Hi/Lo input level switch accommodates  a wide range of signals, from line-level  to instrument-level.

Sending a signal through the unit  with Echo Level turned right down, we  couldn't hear any difference whether the  Echo Verb was bypassed or not – so it  doesn't corrupt the source sound, unlike  most tape echoes we have used before.

We've enjoyed the convenience of  digital delays for well over 20 years, but  in the days before programmable delay  times and echo/tempo charts, engineers  would routinely dial in a tape-based  echo device by ear. It was never an  exact science but it's actually very easy  to accomplish and the slightly too fast  or slow results often give the groove a  better feel because we rely on our  musical ears rather than our calculators.

We sent the Logic metronome into the Echo Verb, selected the last replay head (No6) turned Sustain up about half way then adjusted Speed to get a quarter beat. You can hear when it's as near as damn it because the dry signal and the echoes start flanging.

Remarkably, all the other heads  sounded more or less in-the-pocket too,  so once Speed is set, you can use the  heads individually or in combination to  achieve the desired effect. This is best  done while listening to what the Echo  Verb is doing in the context of the mix.

The Tone switch is crucial to the way  the Echo Verb works. It's a preset treble  rolloff that, to put it crudely, toggles  between 'modern' and 'vintage' modes.  Without the treble rolloff, the Echo Verb  produces an impressively clear and  clean delay signal, although it's not  exactly hi-fi. Like all good tape echo  units, the Echo Verb starts to feed back  if you turn up Sustain (the repeat  control) high enough. Of course, plug-in  tape echo simulators do the same, but  real tape echo units are much more  'playable' and responsive.

Treble cut darkens the tone of the  echoes quite a bit, but that enables you  to turn up Sustain higher before the  feedback kicks in. What's more, the  sonic difference between the echoes  and the dry signal enable you to make  the effect louder without interfering with  the dry signal.

Room for all

Although it's primarily an echo device,  as its name suggests, the Echo Verb  can also be used for reverb. After all,  reverb is simply multiple echoes that are so close together that they sound  continuous. To switch to reverb mode,  press and hold button No1 for three  seconds. Five reverb presets can then  be selected using the other numbered  buttons. It's not a long lush reverb, but it  is interesting in a short, lo-fi and tinny  sort of way. We found it particularly wellsuited  to electric guitar.

Although it's capable of surprisingly  clean tones, the Echo Verb can be  pushed into a very pleasing overdrive.  When you use the jack input and  output, the input level control does not  affect the dry signal, so you can crank it  up until the red light flashes and distort  the echo side while controlling it with  Echo Level and keeping the dry signal  pure. For guitarists, the downside might  be the Echo Verb's inability to push the  front end of their amps into distortion –  common practice with Space Echos,  Copycats and the like.

Old meets new

Anybody might reasonably consider  £1,880 a lot of money to pay for a tape  echo. If you intend to use a tape echo  only occasionally to add something  special or different to a mix, then this  probably isn't the product for you.  Rather, it's a niche product for those  who appreciate and understand both  the sonic charms and the limitations of  tape echoes, and would like to have one  as an integral part of their studio setup.

Blue Coconut has certainly overcome many of the technical shortcomings of traditional tape echo machines, while the clever controls ensure that the distortion and restricted bandwidth that so many of us love are still there should you need them. The result is that the Echo Verb is a convenient and superbly spec'ed tape echo for the modern recording and mixing environment.