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ANALOGUE SYSTEMS RS-INTEGRATOR
SAMPLER/DELAY
SAMPLER/DELAY
SAMPLER/DELAY
SAMPLER/DELAY
SAMPLER/DELAY
RS290
ECHO/DELAY
ECHO/DELAY
ECHO/DELAY
ECHO/DELAY
ECHO/DELAY
Echo was almost certainly the earliest 'effect' used on electronic sounds. It is also the easiest to produce:
all you need is a tape recorder with a record head offset by a few centimetres from the playback head. If
you then record a sound onto the tape, you can replay it as a single echo a few fractions of a second later,
with the delay determined by the tape speed and the distance between the heads. Later innovations
included machines with multiple heads that produced a series of echoes, and tape loop systems that - if
you wished - extended the number of echoes to infinity, each sounding muddier and less like the original
sound than the previous. If you listen to the electronic music of the 1950s, you'll find it awash with tape
echo, sometimes used to excellent effect, more often not.
The problem with tape echo was that it was neither convenient nor cheap to produce. A lighter and more
affordable alternative arrived in the 1970s with the development of the bucket brigade device, or BBD.
Although totally analogue in nature, a BBD takes a series of samples of the incoming audio, and allows
you to tap these at various stages as they pass down a series of discrete steps through the device. BBDs
made cheap electronic delay lines a commercial reality and, although they never sounded as good as
their tape-based counterparts, solid state "echo units" soon became a staple of electronic music.
Although the maximum delay times available from BBD echo units tended to be rather short - of the
